Inverted Passion

Be passionate about the territory, not the map

All posts by Paras Chopra

Getting things done by not trying

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Book Summary

I recently finished a very short book with an intriguing title: Why Greatness Cannot be Planned.

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.

Objectives only work when your goal is one hop away from where you are

Setting a goal makes sense when you know how to achieve them. Let’s say you’re a published author working on your next book and you already have an agreement with a publisher. In this case, setting an objective for yourself that you should finish the first draft by a specific date makes sense because everything is in place for you to achieve it. ...  Read the entire post →

What bootstraps intelligence?

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Philosophy, Systems

A musing on how intelligence comes to be.

The bedrock of intelligence is abstractions – the thing we do when we throw away a lot of information and just emphasise on a subset of it (e.g. calling that thing an apple instead of describing all its atoms and their x, y, z positions).

But where does the drive to form abstractions comes from? What if it rose from our desire to communicate with others? Since communication bandwidth is always limited, we are driven to find most efficient way of getting an idea across which leads to abstractions. Imagine a world where energy and time is unlimited, we might be communicating all x,y,z positions of things instead of putting labels on them. ...  Read the entire post →

Not everything is physics

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Philosophy, Physics

The first book I ever read was The Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. I liked it so much that I re-read it 8 times. As a young boy, the book had made a lasting impression on me, making me fall in love with ideas such as the arrow of time, black holes, entropy, and Big Bang. Reading this book, you can’t help but open up to the spirit of science that pushes you to keep exploring the boundaries of knowledge, one hypothesis at a time.

I am very much a product of such thinking process. In fact, during one of my sabbaticals, I took up the goal to understand all of currently unsolved problems in physics. This required me to brush up on quantum mechanics, general relativity, cosmology, and standard model. It took some serious effort, but in the end, I’m glad I was able to rise up beyond the pop-science level of understanding of physics. By the end of my sabbatical, I was finally able to look at quantum mechanics equations and understand what they were about. ...  Read the entire post →

Usefulness grounds truth

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Mental Models, Philosophy

Are LLMs intelligent?

Debates on this question often, but not always, devolve into debates on what LLMs can or cannot do. To a limited extent, the original question is useful because it creates an opening for people to go into specifics. But, beyond that initial use, the question quickly empties itself because (obviously) the answer to the question if X is intelligence depends on how you define intelligence (and how you define X).

Even though it is clear that words are inherently empty, internet is full of such debates. People focus on syntax, when semantics is what runs the world. ...  Read the entire post →

You can’t jail an AI

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Philosophy

Here’s why I worry about AI.

We know that people can get away with anything to pursue their goals (of profit, power, etc.) as long as they know they can get away with it, without negative consequences. We have had Hitlers, and insider traders.

But the world keeps them in check via law and guns.

Like humans, AIs will have goals (like maximize profit or please a human via an entertaining chat) and they will be cleverer than humans in coming up with schemes that help them get away with their plans without negative consequences. ...  Read the entire post →

How to be a messy thinker

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Book Summary, Notes and Summaries

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.

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. After all, if you are convinced that you think clearly by default, why would you put in any extra effort to scrutinize your thought process? ...  Read the entire post →

Why time seems to pass faster as we age

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Personal, Philosophy

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 – we have fewer years to live, and each year flies 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. 

3/ Our brain is a prediction device.

Its top job is to construct a model of the world so that we get a survival and reproductive edge.  ...  Read the entire post →

A primer on dopamine

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Biology, Notes and Summaries, Psychology

1/ I recently made notes on the book “Hooked” but wasn’t satisfied by the depth of explanation in it.

2/ I wanted to get down into neuroscience of habit-forming products and that inevitably lead me to the (in)famous neurotransmitter dopamine.

3/ Before we dive into what dopamine does, let’s first make one thing clear: dopamine does NOT generate pleasurable feelings. (In fact, it is the other way around – pleasurable feelings generate dopamine)

The neural circuits that lead us to “liking” are separate from the circuits that generate “wanting”. ...  Read the entire post →

Review of 2023

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Notes and Summaries, Reading Recap

Time is strange – 2023 simultaneously felt too long and too short. It was short because I remember recently writing my 2022 review, and it was long because I ended up packing a lot of stuff into it.

✅ Train 5 days a week (including Mixed Martial Arts)

I did manage to train 5 days per week (at least for the latter part of the year). Training every weekday has become a habit now, and it’s something I wish to never give up on.

And yes, it’s three days of strength training and two days of MMA!

✅ Got myself a tattoo!

I’m endlessly fascinated by the concept of time, and how one can never grab it still. Time starts when we become aware of it, and ends with death. So, in many ways, we’re nothing but time.  ...  Read the entire post →

Notes from the book “Hooked”

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Book Summary, Notes and Summaries

I re-read the book Hooked by Nir Eyal and these are my notes.

1/ The key question that the book answers is: how to make habit-forming products. And its answer is a model that involves four stages: a) trigger; b) action; c) variable reward; d) investment

2/ Why should products be habit-forming? It’s because only those products that become part of someone’s daily life go on to become valuable. So, whether a product has habit formation potential is a leading indicator for whether the product will turn out to be valuable. ...  Read the entire post →