Inverted Passion

Be passionate about the territory, not the map

All posts by Paras Chopra

Life as a physical process

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Biology, Book Summary, Philosophy, Physics

It’s always hard to define life. Everyone has their favorite definition – some describe it as a struggle against entropy, while others describe it as an emergent property of chemicals. Countless books have been written on the topic, yet we’re far from a consensus.

Against the backdrop of the second law of thermodynamics, life seems like an improbable accident. When everything tends to go towards disorder, how come life is able to create cities, computers and space ships? How do we reconcile all the beautiful complexity we see around us with the stupidly simple laws we observe in physics? ...  Read the entire post ā†’

Do you know what GDP is?

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Economics

I thought I knew! But the more I introspected, the hazy my understanding got. Is GDP amount of stuff produced or consumed? Does it include imports or exports? What does it have to do with well being? Why does it keep increasing?

So, I fired up Claude and started understanding what GDP really is. This post contains my notes on the same.

But before we start, it’s worthwhile to reflect how many such concepts that we think we know, do we really know. Often there’s a gap between what we think we know, and what we actually know. It’s worthwhile to question your understanding of commonplace phenomena. Do we know what life is? What does productivity mean? How do greenhouse emissions warm the Earth, and so on. For so many such things, our mind convinces us that we know stuff when upon probing, it turns out to be a vague miasma. ...  Read the entire post ā†’

Don’t compete

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Personal, Philosophy

The Internet is full of people winning all the time. Someone is traveling to exotic locations, someone else is raising funds, and another person is winning awards. Essentially, everyone around you is succeeding while you do spend your days as the nature intended – sleeping, eating, smiling, chatting with friends, and spending time with your cat.

But, who here is really winning?

Imagine our society as a living and breathing organism with its own agenda. What would be on its agenda? First of all, like you, society would want to not die. Second, like you, it would want to thrive. ...  Read the entire post ā†’

2024 wrapped

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Personal

This year’s review is going to be shorter than 2023 (and previous years) because I’m in Goa right now for a holiday and I don’t feel like being in front of a screen for long.

I mean, just look at this view and tell me that you’d rather be in front of a screen writing a review.

Photo by Aakanksha Gaur

But traditions must be upheld, so here’s a quick review of my eventful year.

šŸ«” Shut down Nintee

Earlier in the year, I shut down my startup Nintee and returned (the remaining) ~75% of funding back to investors. Everyone in my team got 6 months salary as a severance and an open offer to join my other company Wingify. ...  Read the entire post ā†’

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 ā†’

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 ā†’

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 ā†’

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 ā†’

You canā€™t jail an AI

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Philosophy

Hereā€™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 goalsĀ (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 ā†’

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 ā†’