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.

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More from @paraschopra

Nov 10
Kicked off the 2nd batch of Turing’s Dream, the AI residency that I run in Bangalore!

Here’s what they’re upto… Image
1/ Adithya S Kolavi @adithya_s_k is a 4th year engineering student at PES.

In 2024, he set a target to achieve 10k stars across his github repositories

His most famous one is Omniparse and has 5.5k stars, it's a library that converts unstructured data into structured data for LLMs github.com/adithya-s-k/om…
@adithya_s_k 2/ Arjun Balaji @kaizen797 - 4th year engineering.

He's working with UPI team to detect money laundering using graph NNs. (it has trillion edges, so fun problem!)

He's also working with a Harvard team to map MRI images over time to 3D space to see how brain structures change!
Read 13 tweets
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

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