Hacking Neuroscience to be Happy
Varun, my beloved friend, created a very profound series of content on YT a while ago — Cero!
He shared some grand ideas in the playlist — from Quantum Suicide to Simulation theory to immortality and a lot more.
One of the videos from the series shares some fundamental insights about the human brain and how you can hack neuroscience to live a happier life.
Large Size = Fast Extinction
Image generated with Dall-E
I was re-reading Taleb’s Antifragility and I came across an interesting idea.
He said as the size of organizations gets bigger they become more fragile i.e. small errors can cause big harm to them.
He draws a parallel around this idea and mentions that it is true even more for organisms in nature — large animals get extinct fast.
After reading all of this, I googled it and found this article about why animals big in size get extinct. Enjoy reading it!
https://www.livescience.com/4162-perils-huge-large-creatures-extinct.html
Mimetic Trap
Remember when as kids one of your friends brought a Beyblade for the first time and in two days all of us had one?
It’s human nature to imitate the actions of people in our social group. We all borrow desires from our surroundings. This is vaguely what Girard’s mimetic theory talks about.
Brian Timar, a software engineer at SpaceX did his Masters from Caltech.
In this article, he shares his experience of getting caught in a mimetic trap — things you do only out of social pressure without having any actual interest in it.
Spoiler alert: he regrets his decision to be an engineer even after getting a job at the world’s most ambitious company.
It is a deeply philosophical read that will leave you with a hint of existential crisis.
https://www.briantimar.com/notes/mimetic/mimetic/
Content I Shared This Week
Kushal Mehra Shutting Me Down for 90 Minutes Straight
This is an excellent conversation I had with Kushal Mehra — host of The Cārvāka Podcast — about decoloniality and its philosophical roots.
He also shared profound insights on sports, philosophy, public policy, current events, history, economics, and other topics.
Three Things to Keep in Mind While Moving Abroad
Moving abroad as a student is a challenging venture. Being all alone in a place where nobody speaks your native tongue is tough.
Here are three things that you should be extremely careful about while moving to a different country.
On Popular Demand - Season 2
In this episode of OPD, Aish and I discussed a lot of insights around what went behind the scenes of writing my first book.
We exchanged many ideas around why I wrote this book, why we named it "Don't Shut Up", and what's the ideal way to consume this book.