Culture Is The Mass-Synchronization Of Framings!

This can be good and bad too. Hence, I have an aversion for that word - "culture".

The genesis of almost all savagery, ruthlessness, and immorality against animals is from so called culture, 

This is an insightful piece on the same topic: 

A mental model is a simulation of "how things might unfold", and we all build and rebuild hundreds of mental models every day. A framing, on the other hand, is "what things exist in the first place", and it is much more stable and subtle. Every mental model is based on some framing, but we tend to be oblivious to which framing we're using most of the time (I've explained all this better in A Framing and Model About Framings and Models).

Framings are the basis of how we think and what we are even able to perceive, and they're the most consequential thing that spreads through a population in what we call "culture".

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Each culture is made of shared framings—ontologies of things that are taken to exist and play a role in mental models—that arose in those same arbitrary but self-reinforcing ways. Anthropologist Joseph Henrich, in The Secret of Our Success, brings up several studies demonstrating the cultural differences in framings.

He mentions studies that estimated the average IQ of Americans in the early 1800's to have been around 70—not because they were dumber, but because their culture at the time was much poorer in sophisticated concepts. Their framings had fewer and less-defined moving parts, which translated into poorer mental models. Other studies found that children in Western countries are brought up with very general and abstract categories for animals, like "fish" and "bird", while children in small-scale societies tend to think in terms of more specific categories, such as "robin" and "jaguar", leading to different ways to understand and interface with the world.

But framings affect more than understanding. They influence how we take in the information from the world around us. Explaining this paper, Henrich writes:

People from different societies vary in their ability to accurately perceive objects and individuals both in and out of context. Unlike most other populations, educated Westerners have an inclination for, and are good at, focusing on and isolating objects or individuals and abstracting properties for these while ignoring background activity or context. Alternatively, expressing this in reverse: Westerners tend not to see objects or individuals in context, attend to relationships and their effects, or automatically consider context. Most other peoples are good at this.

How many connections and interrelations you consider when thinking is in the realm of framings. If your mental ontology treats most things as largely independent and self-sufficient, your mental models will tend to be, for better or worse, more reductionist and less holistic.

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The basic force behind all culture formation is imitation. This ability is innate in all humans, regardless of culture: we are extraordinarily good imitators. Indeed, we are overimitators, sometimes with unfortunate consequences.

Overimitation ... may be distinctively human. For example, although chimpanzees imitate the way conspecifics instrumentally manipulate their environment to achieve a goal, they will copy the behavior only selectively, skipping steps which they recognize as unnecessary [unlike humans, who tend to keep even the unnecessary steps]. ... Once chimpanzees and orangutans have figured out how to solve a problem, they are conservative, sticking to whatever solution they learn first. Humans, in contrast, will often switch to a new solution that is demonstrated by peers, sometimes even switching to less effective strategies under peer influence.

— The Psychology of Normative Cognition, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, emphasis theirs.

We have a built-in need to do what the people around us do, even when we know of better or less wasteful ways. This means that we can't even explain culture as something that, while starting from chance events, naturally progresses towards better and better behaviors. That's what science is for.

Once the synchronized behaviors are in our systems, when we are habituated to certain shared ways of doing things, these behaviors feed back into our most basic mindsets, which guide our future behaviors, which further affect each other's mindset, and so on, congealing into the shared framings we call culture, i.e.: whatever happens to give the least friction in whatever happens to be the current shared behavioral landscape.

This is why, often, formal rules and laws do indeed take root in a culture: not because they're rules, but because the way they are enforced creates enough friction—or following them creates enough mutual benefits—that, like in the corridor lanes, crowds will settle into following them. This is also why, perhaps even more often, groups will settle into the easy "unruly" patterns.

 

Deep Congruence

Congruence is a quality discussed by many psychologists—Carl Rogers popularized the word, saying that, among other things, it is a necessary trait in therapists. He defined it (roughly) as a state of unity between your experience, your self-concept, and your outward behavior. Which is to say: you aren’t pretending. I think this is a solid definition, but it’s likely to be misread. It can sound like living up to a scorecard—I said I would be an academic, now I’m tenure track. If that were the only requirement, congruence would be fairly common, when in fact highly congruent people are uncommon.

Deep congruence requires accepting all of the stuff of your life, every particle of feeling. If you are highly congruent, you disown none of your experience. None of it. You agree with what you’re doing with your time. You accept the stubborn approach of death, the arbitrariness of your fortune, your unimportance on the cosmic timescale, your potential importance for the local environment, the emotions of you and the people around you, the resources you’ve squandered. What stops congruence from occurring are layers of denial that are unpleasant to pass through. Although congruence is a source of endless happiness, the path there can be devastating. To paraphrase a cliche, you may have to finally give up on experiencing a better past.

But must we define it? We know it when we see the genuine article in abundance. We can spot people who live in non-naive contentment, or unhurried action. Running into them is comforting if we seek integrity ourselves. Speaking to my teacher feels like drinking water from a lucky well, filled with life-restoring minerals. On the other hand, if we’re interested in maintaining some variety of denial, the company of highly congruent people is disturbing. The falsehoods we’re trying to maintain immediately ring false before them. They appear as highly but particularly resonant chambers, in which integrity echoes and bullshit dies immediately.

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Congruent people compel us because they have little to prove; they have converged on an inner authority. Thus, when you encounter them, you don’t feel like you’re being enlisted in their ongoing arguments with themselves. You’re not recruited to shore up their self-image, or resolve their dilemmas. You’re liberated to be as you are—talking to them feels like entering open space. Their love isn’t grabby and manipulative, and they can say hard truths from a place of simple observation. They can deeply understand you without needing to suck up your essence, or merge with it. Being listened to in this way, by a person capable of it, is psychoactive; you hear yourself anew.

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Seeking congruence can sound selfish. However, in practice, it rarely is. Given that our environments consist of others in pain, facing the totality of your experience and remaining self-serving requires being a real asshole. Most of us are less cruel than that, and capable of gradually moving towards increasingly skillful love for others. The highly congruent people I know tend to support everyone around them, in ways both obvious and not.

One reliable test to see whether you’re in a place of congruence is the existence of boredom. When you are in a state of congruence, at rest you don’t feel bored. Instead you feel peace. What needs to be done has been done or will be done, there is no need to flail against the silence.

I’ve heard from multiple sources that deathbed enlightenment is a real phenomenon. Which is to say: approaching death, many disintegrated and suffering people suddenly find acceptance. Congruence is coming after you; you can almost outrun it, if you try.

- More Here

Akrasia !

Sometimes a simple word explains so much about humanity. 

Akrasia is a greek word, wiki page: 

Akrasia refers to the phenomenon of acting against one's better judgment—the state in which one intentionally performs an action while simultaneously believing that a different course of action would be better. 

Sometimes translated as "weakness of will" or "incontinence," akrasia describes the paradoxical human experience of knowingly choosing what one judges to be the inferior option.

Where do I even start unpacking this :-) ?  There are so many people who are akratic in some of the fundamental elements of one's life. I mean the core of existence 

Paul's piece about the stupidity of free-soloing, his accident and finally, how he learned from his akratic traits and now - the best part rebuilding his life with cat name Koshka.

for the record, I skipped the akratic segment and went straight to Max :-); man what a decision was that! Thank god, for once my pre-frontal cortex helped me.

Precisely because free soloing is selfish and stupid, it is a controversial topic even amongst climbers. The vast majority of free climbers do not free solo. Some of my closest climbing partners would commit to doing very serious traditional climbing routes, and yet firmly draw the line at soloing. (And trad climbing definitely is serious, as proved by the cripple voice dictating these words.) They told me bluntly that I should never do it, and they didn’t like hearing about it when I had done it. So why did I do it?

There is an ancient Greek term, akrasia. It is sometimes translated as “weakness of will” – although I don’t like that translation, because it already narrows and contorts the field in ways that distort reflection. Nonetheless, akrasia refers to situations in which a person apparently acts against their own professed best judgement. For example, the student who knows that the best thing to do is stay home and prepare for tomorrow’s exam (the outcome of which is crucial to her final grade), and yet who nonetheless goes to the party and gets drunk. She knows and agrees and affirms that the best thing for her to do is to stay home and revise. But she not only does something else, she does it when she herself knows and agrees and affirms that it is a worse thing for her to do. She is akratic. We all are, sometimes.

But the stakes of akrasia are not always the same.

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On the way down, I texted my friend and told him what I had just done. He told me that I was a fucking idiot. I didn’t care. Sometimes you just have to go to the party, even when you know you shouldn’t. And whether you ultimately regret going will depend on more than just the fact that you went. Akrasia is a bird of many feathers.

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But then I try to watch my anger, notice it – and let it slip away. Fair doesn’t come into it. It never did, and it never will. Such anger leads to nothing worth keeping. This week I adopted a cat. I’ve named her Koshka. You rebuild a life, one brick at a time.

 

The Four Pillars of High Agency

 

- Via Here

The Original Position Fallacy!

This is so god-damn important to understand that it should be taught in schools for all grades!

Mathew McAtter has a beautiful explanation: 

This is a simplified example of the Original Position Fallacy in action. A person supports some kind of policy, action, or revolution because they assume they’re either A) in the group that will benefit from it, or B) not in the group that will suffer from it. When used as a literary device, this is often used to compount a character’s suffering with the knowledge that they supported the measure when they thought someone else would be hurt. Indeed, you can think of the Original Position Fallacy as the opposite of the Golden Rule.

You’ve probably seen this fallacy in action among certain communists, neo-reactionaries, and a few libertarians. Many of these often support a massive upheaval to the social order, believing of course that they would inevitably survive (or even thrive) afterwards. Many modern communists forget that in many revolutions, large groups of supporters suddenly found only too late that the revolutionaries considered them in the class of the “bougie” instead of the true “proletariat”.

I’ve personally met many libertarians that believed that if only the government got out of their way, they could finally thrive. Of course, few give thought to any possible negative outcomes of reduced regulation (like Pan-Am, which was famously doomed when the airline industry was deregulated) or possibilities of being crushed by far more ruthless competitors. Many also seem to forget even recent times in their lives that they’ve had to rely on some kind of safety net, and don’t consider what might happen if that net were no longer there.

The Neo-reactionaries are an interesting bunch that desire a return to monarchies and autocracies, away from democracy. Few of them consider that they might end up outside a given autocrat’s favored inner circle, or that technology has not stopped modern monarch’s courts from being snake pits.

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The point I’m trying to make is that even if you only have your own self-interests at heart deep down, you should at least acknowledge that the future is far too uncertain for you to be mentally throwing anyone under the bus. After all, your guarantees that you won’t be under the bus with them are getting shakier by the day.

Well, Pastor Martin Niemöller's poem goes well with original position fallacy and I am literally living to see this happen now. Alas, human nature doesn't change that easy: 

First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me

And of-course one of my favorite quotes of all time: 

Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly will commit every conceivable atrocity. The danger does not come merely from habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy. Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of error left over for experiment however beneficent. Once the prisons of the mind have been opened, the orgy is on. … The work of preserving society is sometimes onerous, sometimes almost effortless. The more elaborate the society, the more vulnerable it is to attack, and the more complete its collapse in case of defeat. At a time like the present it is notably precarious. If it falls, we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history.

- Robbery Under Law, Evelyn Waugh

Dhurandhar!

If you fall upholding Dharma, you will attain heaven.

If you are victorious, the world is yours.

So rise, O Arjuna, and prepare yourself for battle.

- Bhagavad Gita 2.37

After a long, long time I have seen a Hindi movie completely engrossed for 3.25 hours!

Amazing casting, immaculate screenplay and complete awareness of every minute details. 

I hope this movie shifts the game of Hindi movies to be more like Malayalam movies. 

This is the first time I watched Aditya Dhar's movie. I need to catch up on his other movies. 

I didn't know the meaning of the Sanskrit word Dhurandhar, so had to look it up.

Dhurandhar means well I got two versions; I like the later version:

• An Expert, master A A top notch person In a specific field.
• A person built to carry unbearable responsibility and still move forward.

Global Water Bankruptcy

Published on the occasion of UNU-INWEH’s 30th anniversary, and ahead of the 2026 UN Water Conference, this flagship report, Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, argues that the world has entered a new stage: more and more river basins and aquifers are losing the ability to return to their historical “normal.” Droughts, shortages, and pollution episodes that once looked like temporary shocks are becoming chronic in many places, signalling a post-crisis condition the report calls water bankruptcy.

The report makes the case for a fundamental shift in the global water agenda—from repeatedly reacting to emergencies to “bankruptcy management.” That means confronting overshoot with transparent water accounting, enforceable limits, and protection of the water-related natural capital that produces and stores water—aquifers, wetlands, soils, rivers, and glaciers—while ensuring transitions are explicitly equity-oriented and protect vulnerable communities and livelihoods.

Crucially, the report frames water not only as a growing source of risk, but also as a strategic opportunity in a fragmented world. It argues that serious investment in water can unlock progress across climate, biodiversity, land, food, and health, and serve as a practical platform for cooperation within and between societies. Acting early, before stress hardens into irreversible loss, can reduce shared risks, strengthen resilience, and rebuild trust through tangible results.

- More Here

Via 

What water bankruptcy looks like in real life

In financial bankruptcy, the first warning signs often feel manageable: late payments, borrowed money and selling things you hoped to keep. Then the spiral tightens.

Water bankruptcy has similar stages.

• At first, we pull a little more groundwater during dry years. We use bigger pumps and deeper wells. We transfer water from one basin to another. We drain wetlands and straighten rivers to make space for farms and cities.
• Then the hidden costs show up. Lakes shrink year after year. Wells need to go deeper. Rivers that once flowed year-round turn seasonal. Salty water creeps into aquifers near the coast. The ground itself starts to sink.
• That last one, subsidence, often surprises people. But it’s a signature of water bankruptcy. When groundwater is overpumped, the underground structure, which holds water almost like a sponge, can collapse. In Mexico City, land is sinking by about 10 inches (25 centimeters) per year. Once the pores become compacted, they can’t simply be refilled.

 

Is A Revolution Brewing In Evolutionary Theory? - Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES).

This is one of the most important pieces you will read this year. Period. 

Full of insights to act on your everyday life (there are tips, it's up-to you to connect the dots). 

When researchers at Emory University in Atlanta trained mice to fear the smell of almonds (by pairing it with electric shocks), they found, to their consternation, that both the children and grandchildren of these mice were spontaneously afraid of the same smell. That is not supposed to happen. Generations of schoolchildren have been taught that the inheritance of acquired characteristics is impossible. A mouse should not be born with something its parents have learned during their lifetimes, any more than a mouse that loses its tail in an accident should give birth to tailless mice.

If you are not a biologist, you’d be forgiven for being confused about the state of evolutionary science. Modern evolutionary biology dates back to a synthesis that emerged around the 1940s-60s, which married Charles Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s discoveries of how genes are inherited. The traditional, and still dominant, view is that adaptations – from the human brain to the peacock’s tail – are fully and satisfactorily explained by natural selection (and subsequent inheritance). Yet as novel ideas flood in from genomics, epigenetics and developmental biology, most evolutionists agree that their field is in flux. Much of the data implies that evolution is more complex than we once assumed.

Some evolutionary biologists, myself included, are calling for a broader characterisation of evolutionary theory, known as the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES). A central issue is whether what happens to organisms during their lifetime – their development – can play important and previously unanticipated roles in evolution. The orthodox view has been that developmental processes are largely irrelevant to evolution, but the EES views them as pivotal. Protagonists with authoritative credentials square up on both sides of this debate, with big-shot professors at Ivy League universities and members of national academies going head-to-head over the mechanisms of evolution. Some people are even starting to wonder if a revolution is on the cards.

In his book On Human Nature (1978), the evolutionary biologist Edward O Wilson claimed that human culture is held on a genetic leash. The metaphor was contentious for two reasons. First, as we’ll see, it’s no less true that culture holds genes on a leash. Second, while there must be a genetic propensity for cultural learning, few cultural differences can be explained by underlying genetic differences.

Nonetheless, the phrase has explanatory potential. Imagine a dog-walker (the genes) struggling to retain control of a brawny mastiff (human culture). The pair’s trajectory (the pathway of evolution) reflects the outcome of the struggle. Now imagine the same dog-walker struggling with multiple dogs, on leashes of varied lengths, with each dog tugging in different directions. All these tugs represent the influence of developmental factors, including epigenetics, antibodies and hormones passed on by parents, as well as the ecological legacies and culture they bequeath.

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Take the idea that new features acquired by an organism during its life can be passed on to the next generation. This hypothesis was brought to prominence in the early 1800s by the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who used it to explain how species evolved. However, it has long been regarded as discredited by experiment – to the point that the term ‘Lamarckian’ has a derogatory connotation in evolutionary circles, and any researchers expressing sympathy for the idea effectively brand themselves ‘eccentric’. The received wisdom is that parental experiences can’t affect the characters of their offspring.

Except they do. The way that genes are expressed to produce an organism’s phenotype – the actual characteristics it ends up with – is affected by chemicals that attach to them. Everything from diet to air pollution to parental behaviour can influence the addition or removal of these chemical marks, which switches genes on or off. Usually these so-called ‘epigenetic’ attachments are removed during the production of sperm and eggs cells, but it turns out that some escape the resetting process and are passed on to the next generation, along with the genes. This is known as ‘epigenetic inheritance’, and more and more studies are confirming that it really happens.

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Likewise, the diverse, culturally learned foraging traditions of orcas – where different groups specialise in particular types of fish, seals or dolphins – is thought to be driving them to split into several species. Of course, culture reaches its zenith in our own species, where it is now well-established that our cultural habits have been a major source of natural selection on our genes. Dairy farming and milk consumption generated selection for a genetic variant that increased lactase (the enzyme that metabolises dairy products), while starchy agricultural diets favoured increased amylase (the corresponding enzyme that breaks down starch).

All this complexity can’t be reconciled with a strictly genetic currency for adaptive evolution, as many biologists now acknowledge. Rather, it points to an evolutionary process in which genomes (over hundreds to thousands of generations), epigenetic modifications and inherited cultural factors (over several, perhaps tens or hundreds of generations), and parental effects (over single-generation timespans) collectively inform how organisms adapt. These extra-genetic kinds of inheritance give organisms the flexibility to make rapid adjustments to environmental challenges, dragging genetic change in their wake – much like a rowdy pack of dogs.

Despite the excitement of all the new data, it’s unlikely to trigger an evolution revolution for the simple reason that science doesn’t work that way – at least, not evolutionary science. Kuhnian paradigm shifts, like Popper’s critical experiments, are closer to myths than reality. Look back at the history of evolutionary biology, and you will see nothing that resembles a revolution. Even Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection took approximately 70 years to become widely accepted by the scientific community, and at the turn of the 20th century was viewed with considerable skepticism. Over the following decades, new ideas appeared, they were critically evaluated by the scientific community, and gradually became integrated with pre-existing knowledge. By and large, evolutionary biology was updated without experiencing great periods of ‘crisis’.

The same holds for the present. Epigenetic inheritance does not disprove genetic inheritance, but shows it to be just one of several mechanisms through which traits are inherited. I know of no biologist who wants to rip up the textbooks, or throw out natural selection. The debate in evolutionary biology concerns whether we want to extend our understanding of the causes of evolution, and whether that changes how we think about the process as a whole. In this respect, what is going on is ‘normal science’.

On Satyendra Nath Bose

But Bose’s real story is actually far richer. His life and career reveal a complex, deeply human scientist who navigated intellectual passions and colonial-era challenges to make his historical mark. The narrow focus on his ‘accidental’ discovery overlooks the breadth of Bose’s pursuits and the context that shaped him. Bose was a true polymath, fluent in multiple languages and immersed in literature and philosophy, and a dedicated teacher who believed science should be accessible to everyone, not just an elite few. Crucially, he achieved all this while working under the British Empire, facing the hurdles of a colonised scientist: limited resources, isolation from international peers, and the pressures of life under foreign rule. Acknowledging Bose’s context doesn’t diminish his achievements; instead, it casts them in a more illuminating light. His groundbreaking work was not the result of mythical serendipity alone, but rather the culmination of perseverance, intellect and a willingness to think differently from the heart of a colonial world.

Bose was born on 1 January 1894 in Calcutta (now Kolkata), then the capital of British-ruled India. He was the only, eldest son (among seven children) of a lower-middle-class Bengali family. His father, Surendra Nath Bose, was an accountant with the East Indian Railways who had a knack for mathematics and science. His mother, Amodini Devi, although barely formally educated, managed the large household. Surendra Nath harboured nationalist sympathies; in 1901, he left his secure railway job, a position with the colonial government, to start a small chemical and pharmaceutical venture with a friend. Hence, Surendra Nath’s quiet defiance of colonial structures, and his turn towards Indian scientific enterprise, likely created a family world where a nascent nationalist milieu could thrive. This, I believe, left an enduring mark on his son.

The Bose family belonged to the Bengali Kayastha caste, which was traditionally excluded from the highest echelons of scholarship. By the late 19th century, however, social reforms of the Bengal Renaissance were loosening such barriers and opening up higher education to non-Brahmins. In this milieu of rising opportunities, young Bose demonstrated exceptional talent in mathematics and science, coming top in his classes at university.

Bose launched his academic career just as a new era in physics was dawning, but also during the tumult of the First World War, which cut off direct intellectual contact between British India and the German scientific centres pioneering quantum theory. Bose, however, was determined to keep up with the latest developments. He taught himself German and, with the help of mentors and colleagues, obtained copies of cutting-edge European research. He devoured papers by the physicists Max Planck and Arnold Sommerfeld, and studied advanced texts, such as James Clerk Maxwell’s and J W Gibbs’s treatises on statistical mechanics. Immersing himself in these resources, Bose stayed abreast of the new quantum ideas, even as some Western scientists remained sceptical of concepts such as the light quantum (the photon). Later in life, Bose reflected that working from the ‘periphery’ helped him think independently; the prevailing orthodoxies of the European establishment didn’t bind him.

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By the early 1920s, quantum physics had emerged as a radical new field, offering Bose intellectual freedom from colonial strictures. As I argued in my book The Making of Modern Physics in Colonial India (2020), embracing the quantum provided ‘a great intellectual escape from the hegemony of scientific colonialism’ that defined the British-dominated scientific establishment in India, which focused on teaching classical physics in universities and exploring applied science that benefited colonial interests.

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Notably, Bose was not a traditional firebrand political agitator; he did not lead rallies or write polemics against British rule. His form of nationalism was expressed through intellectual sovereignty. He showed by example that Indians could innovate at the highest levels of physics, even under the constraints of colonial rule. Moreover, by choosing to develop his career in India and by communicating science in an Indian language, he undercut the notion that one must go abroad or use English to be a successful scientist.

Beyond his famous work in quantum statistics, Bose led a rich and varied scientific life. Upon returning to Dacca after his European sojourn, he threw himself into new projects. One of his significant contributions was in the field of X-ray crystallography. With the know-how he gained in de Broglie’s lab in Paris, Bose established one of India’s first X-ray crystallography laboratories at Dacca University in 1926. Under his guidance, the lab’s students and technicians constructed advanced instruments. By the 1930s, they had built a Weissenberg X-ray camera, a sophisticated device for crystal structure analysis, in the department’s workshop. This was cutting-edge equipment for an Indian institution at the time, and it turned Bose’s Dacca lab into a regional hub of research activity. Not only his students used it, but students from other universities (including some from Calcutta) would travel to Dacca to conduct experiments. In an era when Indian scientists often struggled for resources, Bose’s initiative created rare opportunities for hands-on training within his home country.

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True to the label ‘polymath’, Bose’s interests were never confined to physics alone. His lifelong love of literature, music and philosophy complemented his scientific pursuits. Bose was fluent in several languages, including Bengali and English, as well as French, and had a working knowledge of German from his student days. He enjoyed reading the original works of Western philosophers and actively engaged in the cultural and intellectual debates of his time. Friends and colleagues recall that he could discuss the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore or the essays of Bertrand Russell with equal ease, as he could the latest findings in quantum mechanics.

- More Here

3 Antidotes To Your Suffering

So simple but yet a profound wisdom from George Saunders. 

I hardly meet anyone who lives by just one of these, leave alone all three.  

• You’re not permanent. 

• You’re not the most important thing. 

• You’re not separate.

And why is this simple wisdom not omnipresent?

In the beginning, there’s a blank mind. Then that mind gets an idea in it, and the trouble begins, because the mind mistakes the idea for the world. Mistaking the idea for the world, the mind formulates a theory and, having formulated a theory, feels inclined to act… Because the idea is always only an approximation of the world, whether that action will be catastrophic or beneficial depends on the distance between the idea and the world. Mass media’s job is to provide this simulacra of the world, upon which we build our ideas. There’s another name for this simulacra-building: storytelling.

 

Living As A Crane!

Wonderful souls doing this rewarding work since 1973!

Thank you! 

The International Crane Foundation was set up in 1973, with the aim of safeguarding the world’s 15 crane species – most are endangered or vulnerable due to habitat loss, climate change and hunting. As senior aviculturist at the headquarters in Baraboo, Wisconsin, I’m involved in everything from daily feeding to overseeing chick-rearing.

Whenever possible, chicks are raised by their biological parents or adopted by other adult cranes, but when that isn’t possible, we have to raise them, and teach them how to behave like cranes. Some chicks will later be released into the wild, so it’s important that they learn to stay away from people and other predators.

Young birds identify the first large moving object they see as their parent – a process called “imprinting” – so it’s important they don’t see us as humans while we’re raising them. At one time, feeding was done from behind a barrier to reduce interaction, but this wasn’t really practical.

One day, a colleague threw a sheet over himself. A lot of the staff thought he was crazy, but he started developing a more elaborate costume, adding feathers and even wearing pants that matched the colour of cranes’ legs.

Amazingly, the chicks responded well, and followed him as they would an adult crane. The outfits we use now have detailed puppet crane heads on one arm. The other arm is our “wing”. We did away with the feathers to make laundering the costumes easier. Now, any time we spend among the chicks is done in costume.

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It can be tiring work – my arms get sore. Usually we rotate who’s in the costumes every hour or two. Wearing them provides anonymity, so it’s easy to ham it up.

When I started here in 1986, I learned a small amount of crane vocabulary and could mimic the scolding sound made by adult cranes if chicks were fighting or putting themselves at risk. Now we hide an MP3 player under the costume and play recordings of real adult cranes. The coloration of the puppet heads also matches that of real birds – for example, whooping cranes have a patch of red skin, which they tilt towards other birds to warn if they’re too close. I’ll sometimes do that to get a chick to back off.

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Before they leave us, it’s important that the cranes are good flyers and able to get away from predators. Coaching them can be a challenge but we have a prairie where we encourage them by running and flapping, right up to the point where a real crane would leave the ground. We mimic adults’ “pre-flight” call and stretch out the puppet head. Whenever I see a video of us running and flapping, it does look kind of ridiculous, but the chicks get the idea. It makes me feel like a proud parent to see them take flight.

I do dream about work – sometimes, in my dreams, I would finally be able to fly. In others, my volunteers would take to the sky while I couldn’t, or I’d be the chick at the back of the flock, unable to keep up with the rest, and I would feel very sad.

Currently, 10 of the 15 crane species are still threatened with extinction, though the number of whooping cranes in the world has grown over the past 80 years from the low 20s to over 800. Ultimately, our aim is to help create a self-sustaining population where all the youngsters will be reared by real cranes, so we can get rid of the costumes. Although I would miss my interaction with the chicks, what an amazing outcome that would be.

 

What Is The Question?

Finding the question can be fun, as in thinking of a cartoon caption. But it can also be extremely difficult psychologically. Scientists are often expected by the public to know it all, and yet, “feeling stupid” is a common mode of operation for us. Science is the art of dealing with things we do not know enough about. As Wernher von Braun, the father of German and US rocket programs, phrased it: “Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” Science is humbling in this way. For young scientists, it is often very difficult to understand that it is perfectly normal to not know the answer—or even the question. Learning to embrace this uncertainty is part of our maturation as scientists.

Uri Alon has an intuitive image to describe the process of re-finding our questions. Given what we know about a given topic “A,” a researcher predicts that it should be possible to arrive at point “B,” a scientific destination that seems interesting—a hypothesis. However, the plot inevitably thickens over the course of the research project, and new hurdles force the scientist into a meandering path. Soon, the researcher is lost, having lost sight of the start point (which suddenly seems shaky) and end point (which appears unreachable). Uri calls this “being in the cloud”—you have lost your original question, but the reason why this has occurred is strange and thus potentially exciting and itself worthy of study. From inside the cloud, the situation may seem desperate, but Uri sees the cloud as the hallmark of science: if you are in the cloud, then you might have stumbled upon something non-obvious and interesting. “I’m very confused” a student would tell Uri, to which he would reply, “Oh good - So you’re in the cloud!” Eventually, a new question that arose inside the cloud may lead the way to an unexpected destination “C.”

Embracing uncertainty

The scientific method is often perceived as a simple sequence that leads from a problem to an answer, possibly through long iterations of modified hypotheses. But our reality is much less structured: it often starts with a topic and some observations, leading to the finding of patterns and questions about those patterns, possibly long before we have any explicit hypothesis or any direct tests. And even if a project starts out with a very specific hypothesis, in our experiences, it still generally arrives at a very different point than expected.

In some way, then, night science may be most productive when it has no agenda, when there are no particular questions it is trying to reshape or resolve. When the scientist does not have a hypothesis, she is free to explore, to make connections. In some sense, any kind of expectation on how things are to behave—a hypothesis—is a liability that could obstruct a new idea that awaits our discovery. Once night science elucidates and reframes this question, the researcher can use the full power of day science to solve it. In this sense, a major discovery is typically both the solution and the problem.

Much of basic, curiosity-driven science is exploration, and night science is a fundamental part of that; yet funding bodies often demand that research must be hypothesis-driven. But while some part of night science can be done with the help of an armchair and some good coffee, other parts require the exploration of large and complicated data sets. If no funding is provided for such endeavors, the generation of new questions may be stifled, hindering scientific progress: in science, the problem that is eventually solved is often not the one that was initially sought out.

- More Here

Keanu Reeves - Building 15 Dog and Cat Rescue Sanctuaries Across the U.S

Thank you, Sir! 

You are an inspiration. 

“Wick’s Eternal”: The Heart of the Initiative

The name “Wick’s Eternal” is a tribute to Keanu’s iconic role as John Wick, a character who is well-known for his fierce love and protection of his dog, Daisy. This bond, as seen in the movie series, mirrors Keanu’s own relationship with animals. By naming his sanctuary project after this character, Keanu is reinforcing the message that animals are worth fighting for and that their safety and well-being are non-negotiable.

The project aims to offer animals a sanctuary where they are treated with respect and given a chance to heal from past traumas. The sanctuaries will be more than just shelters – they will be homes, providing comfort and safety for animals that have often been victims of neglect or cruelty.

The Sanctuaries: A Safe Haven for Animals

Keanu’s sanctuaries will be located in both urban and rural areas across the U.S. Each facility will be designed to cater to the needs of abandoned, elderly, and sick animals, offering a space where they can feel secure and loved. The design of each sanctuary reflects Keanu’s dedication to providing a high-quality environment for the animals. The sanctuaries will feature:

• Veterinary Services – Each sanctuary will have a state-of-the-art veterinary clinic offering medical care to the animals. These clinics will focus on treating common and chronic illnesses, providing necessary surgeries, and offering routine check-ups. Specialized care will be available for elderly animals, ensuring they receive the attention they need. 

• Hydrotherapy Pools – Many of the animals in need of a safe haven have physical ailments such as joint issues or arthritis. To help them regain mobility and improve their quality of life, hydrotherapy pools will be available. These pools offer a low-impact way for the animals to exercise and recover from injuries or age-related issues. 

• Trauma Recovery Areas – For animals who have experienced abuse, neglect, or trauma, the sanctuaries will feature designated quiet spaces where they can recover in peace. These areas will be designed to reduce stress, allowing the animals to heal both physically and emotionally in a safe, tranquil environment. 

• Spacious Outdoor Areas – Each sanctuary will feature expansive outdoor spaces where animals can roam freely, play, and socialize with other animals. These areas will be fenced in, allowing dogs and cats to exercise and enjoy the natural environment. These spaces are crucial for the animals’ well-being, offering them freedom and the ability to engage in natural behaviors. 

• Adoption Services – While these sanctuaries are a permanent home for some animals, others will eventually be adopted out to loving families. Keanu’s initiative is designed to ensure that no animal stays without a family for long. The adoption process will be thorough, ensuring that animals are placed with families who truly care about their well-being. 

• No Adoption Fees – Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Keanu’s project is that there will be no adoption fees for any animals. All services, from medical care to adoption, will be provided free of charge, ensuring that no financial barrier prevents an animal from finding a home.

 

Why Would You Go From Micro To Macro?

Jeez, this pure bullshit. 

For starters, using the phrase "pursuit of happiness" was the big mistake Jefferson made. Happiness had a different meaning at that time, I cannot blame him. I wish he used a word like Gratitude. 

For all its prowess and simplicity the English language has its limitations - subtle richness innate to older languages.

The geniuses here want to consolidate whatever good micro words English has into one bucket called Happiness. 

God bless my species. 

Richard Alley - Predicting Future Sea-Level Rise

Members of our broader research group are working extensively in the field. This especially involves the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, the major project to learn what is going on in the most vulnerable part of the most vulnerable ice sheet in the Antarctic, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which includes the Thwaites Glacier. After seasons lost to Covid, a major expedition will be traversing down Thwaites, using radars, seismic sensors and more to characterize the ice and its bed.

Other groups are working farther downstream, extending work that has been done on the ice shelf and in the ocean beyond. Thwaites is vast, larger than the state of Florida. It is some 80 miles across, making it arguably the widest glacier on Earth. Since the 1990s, scientists have reported on the increased velocity of its movement and the doubling of its contribution to sea-level rise. Its collapse would trigger meters of sea-level rise in the decades and centuries to come, hence its popular nickname in the media, Doomsday Glacier.

[---]

What are the challenges in predicting how much warming will ultimately cause the Thwaites Glacier to break apart?

Some of this is really difficult, especially where fractures are involved. Think about ceramic coffee cups dropped on hard floors. Sometimes the coffee cup just bounces, or the rim chips, or the handle breaks off, but sometimes the whole thing shatters. Scientists can accurately predict the average behavior of a lot of coffee cups dropped on a lot of floors, if you tell us the height of the drop, the type of floor, the type of cup and a few other things. But predicting the exact behavior of the next cup dropped is really difficult, in part because the behavior depends on whether there are small cracks buried deep in the material of the cup, among others. Predicting exactly how much warming is needed to break parts of Thwaites will be harder than predicting coffee cups.

Sounds like there’s still a lot of uncertainty here. How should policymakers cope with that?

First of all, the uncertainties are not our friend. There is basically no way that sea-level rise can be notably smaller than expected. When we make the climate warmer, the ocean warms up. That makes the water expand, which raises sea level. That’s relatively easy.

The glaciers in the mountains are doing what we projected decades ago: They really are melting. That takes water that was ice out of the mountains and puts it into the ocean, and that raises sea level. Those are fairly easy predictions. There are not large uncertainties in those. The uncertainties are: Will the ice shelves break off, will the flow of the big ice sheets change a lot, with the potential to drive these very large, rapid sea-level rises. So the uncertainties are on the bad side.

In other areas of our lives, we tend to invest a lot to avoid the possibility of a catastrophe, even if we are not sure it is going to happen. The example I like to use is highway safety. We have highway engineers, we have crumple zones in the car, we have airbags and antilock brakes and seatbelts and we have police out there trying to stop drunken drivers. We are not very likely to get killed by a drunken driver, but the catastrophe would be so bad if it happened that we invest a lot in heading that off.

What would make sense may be to think about sea-level rise and our response to it with the same sort of lens: There are things we can do to better understand why it happens and what the causes are. Next steps might be communities taking steps that reflect scientific findings, which of course have economic as well as social benefits.

- More Here

Real Evil - Inheritance

This is so wrong, massively wrong.

The pain and suffering of billions of unborn kids who will be losers of the birth lottery will be massive and immense in a scale that humanity has never seen. 

Without coming up with a way to control this stupidest idea of automatic inheritance, lot of problems in the world cannot be fixed.  In other words, this is one of the very few fundamental problems in the world. 

Just because A fucked B and C was born hence C gets everything A & B worked hard for in their entire life while C did zilch in life is wrong. This will be one of the the primary root causes that capitalism is failing and might cause democracy to decline in future, 

To state the obvious:

1. We need to segregate the process of defining and understanding a problem vs finding a solution. I am defining a problem here. I have no idea how to solve this problem. I think most of humanity will agree this is a problem. But disagreements come when you start confusing solutions with the process of defining the problem. 
2. Identifying this as a problem doesn't define me nor anyone as a communist or socialist. Fuck communism and socialism; its is proven over and over again as bad ideology not even close to a solution for any problem in the world. 
3. This is the time most people should start understanding this problem and agree that we have to find solutions to this issue. 
4. Solutions might not come for years or decades. 
5. Implementing the solution after #4 might take years or decades. 
6. So good luck sapiens. Max and I will not be alive to see what unveils. 

I have seen a few academic papers but not even is writing or talking about this a fundamental problem. I have been screaming about this for over two decades now. The birth-lottery a.k.a inheritance is the cancer which has potential to destroy democracy. Beware.

Gen X and Millennials Will Inherit Trillions in Real Estate Over the Next Decade - and this is just real estate (this doesn't include cash, 401K, investments et al.). 

Baby boomers and older Americans have spent decades amassing one of the largest concentrations of private wealth in history. Now, that wealth is starting to be passed down to the next generation—and it’s having a ripple effect across the high-end property market.

Over the next decade, roughly 1.2 million individuals with net worths of $5 million or more are projected to pass down more than $38 trillion globally, according to a new report from brokerage Coldwell Banker Global Luxury reviewed exclusively by The Wall Street Journal.

Real estate is poised to play a significant role in the great wealth transfer. Gen Xers and Millennials are set to inherit $4.6 trillion in global real estate over the next 10 years, according to the report, which incorporated data from research firms Altrata and Cerulli Associates. Nearly $2.4 trillion of that property is located in the U.S.

Real-estate brokers, attorneys and family offices say they are already seeing profound changes in who buys luxury homes and how purchases are structured. High-net-worth families are bringing children into conversations about inheritance earlier and making high-stakes real-estate decisions sooner.

[---]

In Manhattan, for instance, family money is accounting for an increasing share of major transactions.

“The price points have just gone wild,” said Ian Slater, a Compass agent who works with ultrawealthy families in New York. “I used to commonly see people buy $3 million to $5 million apartments for their 25- to 30-year-old kids. Now I see people buying $15 to $30 million apartments for their kids.”

[---]

Americans with a net worth of more than $5 million are expected to pass down about $17.3 trillion over the next decade. Centimillionaires—those worth more than $100 million—hold roughly 43% of that wealth, according to the Coldwell Banker report.

With so much at stake, many families are preparing their children by starting conversations early.

When Bobby Castro, 58, began planning how his money would one day pass to his children, he said he was driven primarily by fear that the fortune he and his wife built would be squandered.

“I read there’s over a 70% chance Gen Two—meaning my children—will wind up blowing all the hard work that the creators of Gen One, my wife and I, did,” he said. “And that is a scary stat.”

As a result, he and his wife, Sofia Castro, 54, who live in a sprawling waterfront home with a private dock in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., began building what they call their “100-year legacy plan.” Bobby made his money by founding and later selling a financial-technology company called Bankers Healthcare Group and using the proceeds to amass a real-estate portfolio along the way. The family is now worth about $500 million, he said.

[---]

In cases where multiple siblings inherit one property, things can get complicated, particularly if a plan isn’t put in place before a parent’s death, Cole said. 

“Kids have kids, spouses get involved and complexity becomes more of an issue,” he said. “One wants to keep it because there is sentimental value, one wants to sell it because they want the capital out. There’s a lot to untangle.”

Pain, Life & Knowledge!

Just a brilliant synthesis of knowledge. Just brilliant!

It never crossed my mind to think of knowledge along the same terms as life - struggling to evolve, and adapt. 

Very few can preserve and move knowledge through time while billions don't bother. 

But similar to life, knowledge probably also has a minimum external threshold needed to continue forward (life and knowledge doesn't have any self-imposed or innate plateau but a minimum external threshold to survive another moment in time). I hope we have almost infinite time to reach that minimum threshold. 

Read this small piece packed with knowledge... well I should say wisdom: 

All this grows from a tiny seed long ago swimming in a vast ocean: the sensation of pain. From “Ouch!” to “Eureka!”. We go to universities because our distant ancestors felt pricks and pangs: one sort of knowledge led to the other after a brief period of time (by cosmic standards). A super-scientist might have seen it coming (“It won’t be long before they have advanced degrees and diplomas”). The point I want to stress is that this is a natural evolutionary process, governed by the usual laws of evolution–cumulative, progressive, opportunistic, gradual. 

As species evolve from other species by small alterations, so it is with the evolution of knowledge; there is no simultaneous independent creation of all the species of knowledge. Knowledge-how, acquaintance knowledge, propositional knowledge, the a priori and the a posteriori, knowledge of fact and knowledge of value, science and common sense—all this stems from the same distant root (though no doubt supplemented). It was pain that got the ball rolling, and maybe nothing else would have (pain really marks a watershed in the evolution of life on Earth). Knowledge of language came very late in the game and is not be regarded as fundamental. Epistemology is much broader than language. Knowledge has all the variety and complexity we expect from life forms with a long evolutionary history. Quite a bit of the anatomy of advanced organisms is devoted to epistemic aims–the eyes, the ears, the nose, the sense of touch, memory, thought, and so on. 

Knowledge is not a negligible adaptation. Yet it must have comparatively simple origins. It didn’t arise when a human woke up one bright morning and felt a love of wisdom in his bosom. It arose from primitive swampy creatures trying to survive another day.

Knowledge, like life in general, is a struggle with obstacles. Survival isn’t easy, and nor is knowledge. In both there are obstacles to be overcome, resistance and recalcitrance to be fought, battles to win or lose. Knowledge is hard: you know it don’t come easy. It’s a difficult task. Those books about the history of science draw this lesson repeatedly—it wasn’t easy to figure out the structure of the solar system or the laws of genetics. But that is part of the very nature of knowledge as an evolved capacity—the struggle to be informed. The organism needs to know if it is in danger, so pain came along; we would like to know whether the Earth is the center of the universe, so astronomy was invented. Knowing is the overcoming of obstacles, like the rest of evolved life. Knowledge was born in pain and struggle. It is not for the fainthearted. This is epistemology naturalized.

 

Thank you Taleb!

I am getting older and I know, I will never have death bed regrets.

I want to take a moment to make this an official post. 

Thank you Nassim Nicholas Taleb for teaching me so many things about life. I started reading your works around the same time Max came into my life.

The main trait you taught me is that rigor and thinking go together - thinking rigorously. They are twins. Plus how to stand up for truth. 

I wouldn't be the same person; a little better living being without you. 

Thank you sir. 

Normative Male Alexithymia

Of-course there is a diagnosis for this!

Somehow this crap has become macho. 

Spontaneously at any given moment,  I cry out loud when I think about Max or something that reminds me of him or for no reason at all except breathing life in and out without him... 

I don't care about a moron who cannot do a single push up or pull up but can tight lipped and call themselves a macho. This is another reason culture is dangerous. People follow what their dad did or some dude did without proper reflection. Neuroscience as we know - emotions and reasoning are combined with zillion other pieces for not only every decision we make or not make but just plain living everyday as a normal living being. If a moron is shutting down emotions it is similar to walking naked all the time. It is not civilized, period. 

In recent years, the psychologist Ronald Levant has popularized the notion of “normative male alexithymia.” Alexithymia is the inability to recognize emotions (etymologically, it means lacking the words for feelings), and Levant argues that as boys are taught to repress their emotions for fear of seeming feminine, they lose the ability to identify them. Some research reveals that, at and before age 1, boys are more outwardly emotional than girls, but by age 2 they are less verbally expressive, and by 4 they are less facially expressive. By adolescence, the one emotion boys felt permitted to openly express was anger.

- More Here

I have high respect for men who I know have cried, and I reach out to them on my own. Well, crying is not only the emotion I gauge but men who show normal emotions without any filters. Those are the men I will be friends with for life. 

Omnipresent Ingratitude

Since Max was a puppy, I have heard this reasoning when something bad happens - "Hey, this always happens; everywhere." 

That drove me nuts.  I phrased a term for this - "consoling the conscience."

Then I reminded myself of this Adam Smith quote from his least read book Theory of Moral Sentiments (remember, he wrote only two books):

If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

People don't give a flying fuck about anything else other than themselves and their families but yet, what they love depends completely outside of that circle. 

I would calm myself, and go play frisbee with Max. Max made a freaking little better living being. He was wiser than I will ever be. 

I was barely out of my teens when Manmohan Singh and Narsihma Rao changed the destiny of India. 

Of-course I have no idea on the profound implications of their wisdom. All I saw was Coke and Pepsi was available in India and Aamir Khan's Pepsi ad's were phenomenal. 

And then my prefrontal cortex developed a little. Slowly, I understood their wisdom. I started developing not only gratitude but tremendous wisdom not only for their actions but they were able to pull this off in a country like India. 

Then I read Margaret Mead's wise sentence: 

Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.

Then I read Taleb insight of Minority Rule. 

What happened in India during 1991 was a ridiculous minority of three people (Green revolution happened because of Norman Borlaugh and most Indians don't know his name - god bless my species). 

(Hey a good human from the future: If you are reading this after I am long gone - don't give up animals.

Keep up your good work. Change will come. 

Love from Max and I will always be there for you. 

Remember no one will remember you but that is the ultimate victory for you. Why would you want these fucked up being to remember you? 

You will be one of those longest hours in the "Deep Time" when billions don't even make it micro-milli-second.) 

Samir Varma's wonderful and insightful piece how fucked up and ingratitude Indian memory is: 

The real reasons for the forgetting are deeper. And they’re not unique to India—they’re human. Which makes them harder to fix.

This is the deepest explanation, and it’s not Indian—it’s universal. It’s baked into how human memory works.

You cannot feel gratitude for something that didn’t happen.

The 1991 reforms prevented:

- Soviet-style economic collapse (remember what happened to Russia in the 1990s?)

- Possible mass famine (India was weeks from being unable to import food).

- Political fragmentation of a nuclear-armed state (India could have Balkanized).

- A generation of deeper poverty (another decade of 3.5% growth would have been catastrophic).

- The humiliation of permanent dependency on foreign aid.

- The brain drain accelerating until no one capable was left.

But because these didn’t happen, they’re not real to anyone. You can’t photograph the famine that didn’t occur. You can’t interview the refugees from the civil war that wasn’t fought. You can’t quantify the poverty that wasn’t endured.

The plane that didn’t crash. You don’t celebrate the engineer who prevented the disaster. You can’t point to a specific moment and say “there—that’s what they saved us from.” The counterfactual doesn’t have photographs. It doesn’t have victims whose stories can be told. It doesn’t have monuments or memorial days. It’s just... absence. An empty space where catastrophe would have been.

This isn’t an Indian problem. Americans don’t celebrate whoever prevented the 2008 financial crisis from becoming Great Depression II—assuming anyone did, assuming it wasn’t just luck. They barely remember Paul Volcker taming inflation in the 1980s—an achievement that made possible two decades of American prosperity. They’ve already forgotten the pandemic response that prevented millions more deaths. This is how human memory works. We remember disasters. We forget the people who prevented them.

[---]

Here’s an irony: the reforms succeeded so completely that they became consensus.

Every government since 1991 has continued them:

- BJP under Vajpayee: accelerated privatization

- Congress under Singh: continued liberalization

- BJP under Modi: GST, Make in India, further opening

When policy becomes consensus, it stops being anyone’s achievement. It’s just... what we do now. The way things are.

Nobody campaigns on “I will continue the reforms of 1991.” They campaign on what comes next. The foundation becomes invisible because everyone builds on it.

Success erased the memory of who created it.

Indian mythology celebrates:

- Suffering: Ram’s fourteen-year exile, the Pandavas’ humiliation

- Sacrifice: Bhishma’s lifelong celibacy vow, Karna’s tragic loyalty

- Martyrdom: Gandhi’s assassination, Bhagat Singh’s hanging

- Dramatic confrontation: Arjuna’s crisis on the battlefield

What does this template not include? Competent technocrats who quietly solved problems and went home.

Singh didn’t suffer publicly. Rao didn’t sacrifice visibly. Ahluwalia just... did his job well. They made it look easy. They didn’t create drama. They prevented drama—which is the opposite of what heroes do in Indian narratives.

They don’t fit the heroic template. In India, that’s not a hero. That’s a bureaucrat.

There’s a deeper cultural explanation, and it connects everything.

The successful prevention of catastrophe is the most thankless achievement in human history.

Rao, Singh, and Ahluwalia prevented a disaster. They did it so well that the disaster became unimaginable. And the unimaginable cannot be remembered.

That’s why India forgot them.

And if you are thinking this is history - think again. 

Its only because of steadfast minority refuses to live under totalitarianism that we don't live under totalitarianism. (via)

Fed Chairman Powel statement from yesterday. 

Thank you sir for your courage. Minority Rules!

via MR - Alex Tabarrok

Whether an independent Fed is desirable is beside the point. The core issue is lawfare: the strategic use of legal processes to intimidate, constrain, and punish institutional actors for political ends. Lawfare is the hallmark of a failing state because it erodes not just political independence, but the capacity for independent judgment.

What sort of people will work at the whim of another? The inevitable result is toadies and ideological loyalists heading complex institutions, rather than people chosen for their knowledge and experience.

 

Another word I hate most is "Legacy". I know so many morons who talk about their legacy. These   morons are people I know personally.

What freaking legacy? Just do the right thing.  And if you do the right thing, there is high probability very few people will remember you and thank you. That is just a second order effect. 

Our life is to do the right thing and stand up for truth. That should be a basic and decent categorical imperative. 

Did Grief Give Him Parkinson’s?

Wow! Thats what I said out loud after I read first few lines. This is an unique and precious view into health which happens very rarely - unveiling the complexities of not just Parkinson's but life itself. 

I highly recommend reading this synopsis of Jack and Jeff's life: 

I had driven up to spend time with Jack, who has Parkinson’s disease, and his twin brother Jeff, who does not. Because they are identical twins with identical genomes, it may appear to be a mystery that only Jack is sick. Yet scientists have long known that genes alone cannot explain why some people get Parkinson’s and others don’t. While a handful of genetic mutations are linked to the disease, about 90 percent of cases of Parkinson’s are “sporadic,” meaning the disease does not run in the family. And twins, even identical twins, don’t usually get Parkinson’s in tandem. In one of the largest longitudinal twin studies of the disease, Swedish scientists reported in 2011 that of 542 pairs in which at least one twin had Parkinson’s, the majority were “discordant,” meaning that the second twin was unaffected. The discordance rate was higher for fraternal twins, who are no more alike genetically than any two siblings. But even identical twins had a discordance rate of 89 percent.

So if genes don’t explain most cases, how about the environment? Several environmental factors have been linked to Parkinson’s, which has been shown to occur at higher-than-expected rates in, for instance, people who were prisoners of war in World War II. There is also a higher rate in people who live on farms or who drink well water, probably because of exposure to certain pesticides.

But the environmental connection is precisely what makes Jack and Jeff so interesting. For almost all of their 68 years, they have lived no more than half a mile apart. They have been exposed to the same air, the same well water, the same dusty farm chores, the same pesticides. They built their homes a five-minute walk from each other, on two plots of their father’s 132-acre farm in eastern Pennsylvania. And since 1971 they have worked in the same office, their desks pushed together, at a graphic design firm they co-own. All this makes their particular discordancy tougher to explain.

The existence of a pair of twins with identical DNA and nearly identical environments in which only one is sick—that’s a researcher’s bonanza. Whatever difference can be untangled in the twins’ physiology probably relates directly to the disease and its origins. The genome can be held constant; environmental toxins and other exposures can be held constant; what remains, researchers are left to think, might be an odd shift in a particular neural pathway that has a relevant function all its own.

[---]

It’s where those parallel lives diverge, though, that might provide a lasting new insight. Beginning on the day in 1968 when Jack was drafted and Jeff was not, Jack suffered a series of shifts and setbacks that his brother managed to avoid: two years serving stateside in the military, an early marriage, two children in quick succession, a difficult divorce, and finally, in the biggest blow of all, the sudden death of his teenage son.

After these key divergences in their lives, Jack went on to develop not only Parkinson’s but two other diseases that Jeff was spared, glaucoma and prostate cancer. The twins place great stock in these divergences, believing they might explain their medical trajectories ever since. Scientists are trying to figure out whether they could be right.

[---]

Their lives diverged between the ages of 18 and 25, tilting their paths off course just enough to remain, forever after, the tiniest bit askew. First they chose different colleges: Jeff went to Moravian College in Bethlehem, about an hour from home; Jack went further away, to Syracuse University. They both reported to the draft board in 1968, but only Jack passed the physical. Jeff, who had had a childhood infection that left him nearly deaf in one ear, was classified 4-F.

[---]

The beauty of stem cell cultures is that they behave in the dish similarly to how they would in the body. That’s what happened in this case. The mid-brain dopaminergic neurons grown from Jack’s cells produced abnormally low amounts of dopamine. The Jeff-derived culture produced normal amounts.

But here was the first surprise: Even though Jeff showed no clinical signs of Parkinson’s or any other neurological disease, the Jeff-derived culture was not exactly normal. Both twins, it turned out, had a mutation on a gene called GBA (a mutation already known to be associated with Parkinson’s disease), and as a result, both of their brain cell cultures produced just half the normal amount of an enzyme linked to that gene, beta-glucocerebrosidase. They also both produced three times the normal level of alpha-synuclein, a brain protein usually broken down by a process involving the GBA enzyme. Alpha-synuclein is thought to be related to Parkinson’s, possibly by leading to the formation of the toxic lesions known as Lewy bodies that are a hallmark of the disease.

So rather than answering questions about the twins’ discordance, these findings only raised more. Jeff had the same Parkinson’s mutation his brother had, and his brain cells in culture behaved just as abnormally in relation to the GBA enzyme and alpha-synuclein. Yet he apparently has been spared. It was a puzzle. The scientists hoped the answer existed somewhere in those two Petri dishes.

[---]

To the twins, the “pressure cooker” way Jack dealt with stress, most grievously the loss of Gabe, helps explain Jack’s added health burden today: the Parkinson’s, the glaucoma, the prostate cancer. Jeff said those might be “physical manifestations” of the different ways they handled stress. “Jack internalizes more than I do,” he said.

The connection between stress and disease is a lively research topic, as scientists discover how life experiences alter gene expression and contribute to diseases ranging from diabetes to the common cold. But while statements about the “gene-environment interaction” have become a familiar trope, the twins’ story offers a different way to look at it. Traditionally, “environment” is defined as external events that occur over a lifetime, or the impact of those events at the molecular level, which is in the realm of epigenetics. According to Steve Cole, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine, the relevant aspect of “environment” in terms of the twins might be something more interior and personal. Cole is interested in “the environment we create in our heads”—not what literally happens, but how the individual experiences what happens. “That is the most interesting aspect of the story of the twins,” he told me recently. “Their experiential environments.”

[---]

For now, when they try to explain their divergent medical histories, the twins return to the tyranny of small differences: Jack’s more introverted personality, rockier life, quieter grieving style. In this belief they tap into the suspicions of a small cadre of neuroscientists trying to pinpoint the connection between stress and neurodegeneration. Maybe the twins are on to something the scientists are on the verge of identifying. Or maybe the brothers who have been all but inseparable are trying to protect themselves from the cruel realization that fate can unspool in dissonant ways.

 

Truth & Unearned Certainty - Søren Kierkegaard

And from here on, when we talk about “faith,” we’re using Kierkegaard’s meaning — not belief in a doctrine, but the inner stance required to live with unanswered questions. 

If that sounds narrowly religious, it’s a misread. 

Kierkegaard is describing a stance that shows up wherever people have to act without guarantees: in innovation, in design, in leadership, and many other forms of work.

This pandemic is not just related to religion but also has spread into politics, nationality, culture and even sports, to personal preference of a goddam LLM.

Wise minds observed how humans embrace this pandemic with wide arms - this is a timeless trait of humans. These priceless observations from one such wise mind:

People were comfortable with answers being given to them before questions were even asked. Faith was spoken about constantly, often with confidence, but this confidence felt rehearsed. Kierkegaard couldn’t tell if people ever wrestled with or questioned their beliefs.

Eventually, he realized there was nothing to question. The system had already done the hard part. The role of the individual was to nod in agreement. This created a kind of harmony, but a shallow one… a collective certainty that never had to prove itself against anything real.

As he grew older, Kierkegaard saw how quickly certainty had replaced belief. Whenever a group becomes too sure of itself, it stops producing individuals capable of doing the inward work that faith requires. People learn to perform conviction rather than develop it. Say something often enough and you can skip the part where you understand (or question) it.

He noticed another pattern: People spoke confidently about truths they had never encountered firsthand, truths they had never risked anything to understand. And inherited certainty revealed an uncomfortable vulnerability: Once you depend on a system to hand you your conclusions, you tend to move as the system moves… and you move with confidence.

Kierkegaard wasn’t worried about disbelief. He wasn’t even worried about people changing their minds. His concern was unearned belief. Conviction without scrutiny and identity without introspection. The key here, is that the desire for certainty often poses as a strength, but usually signals the opposite:

A lack of faith.

[---]

Systems (institutions) depend on predictability, and certainty delivers. It keeps people aligned, keeps roles stable, and keeps operations smooth enough that no one has to confront the inner workings. Churches, governments, workplaces, even families in their more rigid forms, all learn to reward conviction that doesn’t ask questions. Call it clarity or discipline or commitment, but the effect is the same: the more certainty people perform, the less individual they become.

This creates a loop that’s hard to break. People adopt certainty because it makes them feel secure. Institutions reinforce certainty because it makes people easier to manage. And the more those two forces reinforce each other, the more faith becomes something referenced rather than lived.

Unearned certainty has consequences. As it takes over, faith has nothing left to do. The questions don’t disappear, but people learn to avoid them. Individuals learn to shrink to fit the expectations of the system… and the system rewards the shrinking.

[---]

It’s a familiar pattern. You don’t have to comprehend the complexity. You only need to sound aligned with it. Certainty becomes a performance of being well-informed, and systems reward the performance because it keeps everything moving in one direction.

This creates a strange contradiction. We now have unprecedented access to the full picture, but we rarely use it. We reach for summaries, frameworks, pre-digested opinions, and the moral scaffolding provided by the groups we belong to. We inherit not just the conclusions, but the emotional stance that comes with them. We feel confident long before we comprehend anything.

Getting information hasn’t been the barrier. The part no system can automate for us is the effort needed to understand the full picture.

People stop wrestling with ideas because the system makes wrestling feel unnecessary. Certainty is faster. Certainty is cleaner. Certainty signals belonging.

The tragedy is this: certainty has never been easier to acquire, and understanding has never required more from us.

 

On Confidence

Awesome insight!

Confidence doesn’t come before action. It comes after repeated exposure. You can’t wait to feel strong. You act, then strength follows.

 

 

 

AI For Science

The best sentences I have read the entire year - on the last day of 2025. 

This is extremely important to understand:

Everyone’s hyped about “AI for Science.” in 2025! At the end of the year, please allow me to share my unease and optimism, specifically about AI & biology.

After spending another year deep in biological foundation models, healthcare AI, and drug discovery, here are 3 lessons I learned in 2025.

1. Biology is not “just another modality.”

The biggest misconception I still see:

“Biology is text + images + graphs. Just scale transformers.”

No. Biology is causal, hierarchical, stochastic, and incomplete in ways that language and vision are not.

Tokens don’t correspond cleanly to reality.

Labels are sparse, biased, and often wrong.

Ground truth is conditional, context-dependent, and sometimes unknowable.

We’ve made real progress—single-cell, imaging, genomics, EHRs are finally being modeled jointly—but the hard truth is this:

Most biological signals are not supervised problems waiting for better loss functions.

They are intervention-driven problems. They demand perturbations, counterfactuals, and mechanisms, beyond just prediction.

Scaling obviously helps. But without causal structure, scaling mostly gives you sharper correlations.

2025 reinforced my belief that biological foundation models must be built around perturbation, uncertainty, and actionability, not just representation learning.

2. Benchmarks are holding biology back more than compute is.

Let’s be honest: Benchmarking in AI & biology is still broken.

Everyone reports SOTA. Everyone picks a different dataset slice.

Everyone tunes for a different metric. Everyone avoids prospective validation.

We’ve imported the worst habits of ML benchmarking into a domain where stakes are much higher. In biology and healthcare, a 1% gain that doesn’t transfer is worse than useless—it’s misleading.

What’s missing isn’t more benchmarks. It’s hard benchmarks:

•Prospective, not retrospective

•Perturbation-based, not static

•Multi-site, not single-lab

•Failure-aware, not leaderboard-optimized

If your model only works on the dataset that created it, it’s not a foundation model—it’s a dataset artifact.

In 2026, we need fewer flashy plots and more humility, rigor, and negative results.

3. “Reasoning” in biology is not chain-of-thought.

There’s a growing tendency to directly apply the word reasoning onto biological LLMs.

Let’s be careful.

Biological reasoning isn’t verbal fluency, longer context windows, or prettier explanations. Those are surface-level improvements. Real reasoning in biology shows up elsewhere: in forming hypotheses, deciding which experiments to run, updating beliefs when perturbations fail, and constantly trading off cost, risk, and uncertainty.

A model that explains a pathway beautifully but can’t decide which experiment to run next is not reasoning, it’s narrating.

2025 convinced me that the future lies in agentic biological AI:

systems that couple foundation models with experimentation, simulation, and decision-making loops.

Closing thought: 

AI & biology is not lagging behind AI for code or language. It’s just playing a harder game.

The constraints are real. The data is messy. The feedback loops are slow. The consequences matter.

If 2025 clarified anything for me, it’s this:

We won’t make progress by treating biology like text. We’ll make progress by building AI that behaves more like a scientist : skeptical, iterative, and willing to be wrong.

On Suffering

I am writing these words while sitting in a comfortable chair in a comfortable 70 degree house. And, I suspect, you are too. Basically comfortable, that is. Physically. Maybe you’re a little cold, but not consumed by the screaming anguish of an icy ocean you cannot escape. Maybe stressed, but not asphyxiating.

It’s times like these I find it far too easy to ignore the most urgent, most serious, most fundamental problem in our world.

[---]

I think there is one way in which we gain a more true understanding. During a time of suffering, this crevasse dissolves and our mental representation of the experience converges with the experience itself. It is then alone we might catch a glimpse of suffering’s otherwise-unthinkable urgency.

And yet this urgency prevents its very own recognition. When we ourselves undergo the worst, our minds and bodies scream in a deafening tone. We do not regard the urgency, the suffering itself, in abstract or conceptual terms. They are not things to be pondered; they are instead experienced directly without the mediating influence of words and symbols. During such a time, empathy is not merely impossible but unthinkable. This is not a character flaw; even the most altruistic among us does not think of others while she is drowning.

Nonetheless, it is tragic.

During the rare occasion during which we viscerally understand intense suffering, it can be challenging to take action to help others. And when, thank God, the agony subsides and our minds return from its all-consuming hell, again capable of empathy, the visceral sense of urgency has taken flight.

[---]

There is no cosmic justice in suffering on behalf of others, but there is something like cosmic justice in acting to prevent and ameliorate the worst experiences in our world.

Factory farming seems a reasonable place to begin, but wild animals plausibly suffer in far greater numbers. Veganism, though morally commendable, is not the sole means by which to help; very few among us, including those who eat meat, actively want animals to suffer. Perhaps we might reduce suffering the most by complementing the question of personal dietary consumption with a focus on preventing the maiming and castration of farm animals without anesthesia, among other interventions.

Among our own species, let us rectify the critical shortage of pain relief in low-income countries. And let us stare the very worst conditions right in their face, though merely as a first step to their mitigation. Cluster headaches, akathisia, and locked-in syndrome come to mind. I will not provide links; you may search for them if you wish. The elimination of these and similar conditions may be one of the most morally urgent issues that we face.

There is nothing beautiful or poetic about pain or agony. The world is not just. There is no virtue, no hidden meaning to be found. And I hope that my words might help to reduce the worst among it.

- More Here

Meta Value - 45

The meditation of life is the ability to understand the self-evidence of current matters before it becomes self-evident to the masses years or worse decades from now. 

In order for something to be self-evident, stick to fundamentals for everything. If humanity lacks fundamental knowledge then it's not a self-evident candidate.