Paras Chopra Profile picture
Feb 6, 2019 15 tweets 2 min read Read on X
1/ A series of unrelated, but related, thoughts on life.
2/ We say ‘create your own meaning in life’ because saying ‘do things that prevent you from dying of boredom and ennui’ is too shocking.
3/ The most rational thing to do in life is actively avoid being rational.

Rationality assumes there’s a fixed and correct way of living life.
4/ Whenever someone says they know what’s important in life, run away.
5/ Existence of evil clearly illustrates that there is no fixed scale against which you can measure your life.

An evil doer generally is a good doer in his/her own eyes.
6/ We invent scales like money, followers, papers published, etc. because we’re afraid of the void.
7/ A life’s worth is undefined because what’s evil for one is good for another.

This gives oppurtunities for people to invent situations that preferentially show them only the good sides.
8/ A company cannot be mission oriented. Markets decide what the company does, not the company.

Similarly, a life can’t be mission oriented. Survival instincts decide what a person does, not the person.
9/ Whatever you do, it’s ok.

As long as you’re alive, you’re doing fine. If you’re dead, you’re dead anyway.
10/ Also, this.

What do we want? EVERYTHING!
When do we want it? NOW!
Are we sure we want it? NO.
11/ Rationality assumes a fixed, well-defined problem to work through.

In the short term, you can be rational about life - in the sense of avoiding pain. But in the long term, your future self is likely to be a different person living in a world very different than today.
12/ How do you rationally make decisions when what you're grappling with isn't even well-defined, let alone uncertain.

Jeff Bezos in context of business says "focus on things that never changes". I also wrote about it earlier: invertedpassion.com/dont-go-where-…
13/ In context of life what does "focus on things that never changes" even mean when we're programmed to be restless creatures? We want to feel progress but we don't like uncertainity. Too much certainity bores us. Even the feeling of "flow" once recognized fades away.
14/ This self doubt emerges because there's nothing fixed and eternal about how to live. There's no unquestionable Pythagoras theorem of life

Everyone invents their own theories, doubts them, then invents again. This has been happening for centuries and will continue happening.
15/ It's fascinating to see the interplay between too-much certainity in life and too-much uncertanity

When the right amount of challenge comes, we start doubting whether we're wasting our life's potential by not doing bigger things as if we're a machine designed for a purpose.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Paras Chopra

Paras Chopra Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @paraschopra

Oct 26
How to achieve success without trying to shoot for it!

My notes from the #book "Why Greatness Cannot be Planned" by @kenneth0stanley and @joelbot3000

🧵 Image
1/ It’s an unconventional self-help book disguised as a computer science research exposition (that’s why the publisher is Springer).

I strongly recommend reading it.

Here is a taste of the book’s main ideas. 👇
2/ Key insight:

Objectives only work when your goal is one hop away from where you are
Read 42 tweets
Sep 14
Turing’s Dream first batch - who is in it and what they’re upto.

🧵
1/ Praveen Chavali - @praveen_chavali is exploring the math of neural networks, and is trying to build a black box optimization method for compressing large models into smaller models.

At yesterday’s tech deep dive, he showed why GANs never converge.
@praveen_chavali 2/ Mehul Goyal - @observerforever is a former hedge fund guy who is now exploring how to model time series data using deep networks.

Yesterday, he explained the problem formulation of predicting sharpe ratio via a reinforcement learning kind of a setup. Image
Read 12 tweets
May 15
How to be a messy thinker

🧵
1/ I love thinking about thinking. Give me a research paper on rationality, cognitive biases or mental models, and I’ll gobble it up.

Given the amount of knowledge I’ve ingested on these topics, I had always assumed that I’m a clear thinker.
2/ Recently, though, it hit me like a lightning strike that this belief is counter-productive.

That’s because is you “know” that you’re a clear thinker, you’re less likely to suspect that you might be missing something big in your thought process.
Read 47 tweets
Feb 26
Why time seems to pass faster as we age.

🧵
1/ I’ve been mega-obsessed with this feeling.

A year as a 36 year old seems so much shorter as compared to when I was a kid or even as a teen.

It seems cosmically unfair - have less years to live, and each year is flying by faster.
2/ But, why is that happening?

My tentative conclusion is that it’s an unfortunate outcome of how evolution shaped our brain to be an efficient storage device.
Read 17 tweets
Feb 19
A (massive) thread on dopamine

🧵
1/ If you prefer the blog format, this thread is available on my website too:

invertedpassion.com/a-primer-on-do…
2/ I recently made notes on the book “Hooked” but wasn’t satisfied by the depth of explanation in it.

So, I went about doing my own research on how to make habit-forming products.

invertedpassion.com/notes-from-the…
Read 74 tweets
Dec 30, 2023
List of books I read in 2023.

🧵
1/ My favorite one was perhaps this one. It traces parallels between religion and trans-humanism.

Highly, highly recommend it.

2/ Highly recommend "Four Thousand Weeks" also. It's an anti-productivity manifesto.

My notes ->

invertedpassion.com/the-anti-produ…
Read 45 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(