Inverted Passion

Know what's true and do what's right

All posts by Paras Chopra

Science often proceeds one grave at a time

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Book Summary

I just finished this tremendously readable and provocative book: Escape from Shadow Physics.

The book is about foundations of quantum mechanics. To be precise, it’s about why we should not give up on trying to find a deeper theory of quantum mechanics.

The usual story in QM is that the theory is complete and the probabilistic nature of our measurements is just the way nature is. Einstein famously rebelled against this, and didn’t accept it even until his death.

Believe it or not, this attitude of his — “God does not play dice” — is in minority today. Most of the modern physicists believe that QM is complete, and that at the micro level reality is simply probabilistic when you make observations. In other words, there’s no deeper explanation to why we get statistical outcomes in QM experiments. ...  Read the entire post →

Brain optimizes for bits per ATP

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Notes and Summaries

I read the book Principles of Neural Design recently.

It’s extremely dense, which you’d hate or love depending on how much you’re in awe with how our brain works. I totally loved it! The book is unique in trying to explain the wonderous complexity of brain using few unifying principles, all of which can be traced to constraints evolution faces, especially with energy efficiency.

The central insight from the book is this:

Brains maximize information (bits) per ATP

Consuming energy and producing ATP is hard. The organism has to work to get energy. During evolution, inefficient designs get outcompeted by efficient designs so we should expect to see efficient designs. For brain, this means squeezing max information and computing using least amount of energy. ...  Read the entire post →

Why aren’t things changing faster?

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Notes and Summaries

Been wondering lately that given everyone has a consultant with all the world’s knowledge in their pockets, we should be seeing efficiency rise across the board everywhere.

Literally everyone can now get personalised advise on how to serve their customers better, improve quality of their outputs, cut inefficiencies and increase revenue.

.. yet, this is nowhere to be seen (especially for small local businesses).

Why aren’t we seeing the rate of change accelerate in the world?

One possible explanation is inertia, and there’s some truth to that. But perhaps a better explanation is that perhaps advice was never a bottleneck. ...  Read the entire post →

What domains will be the last ones to get automated from AI?

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Mental Models

The most useful way to think about AI capabilities is to think of target domains in terms of 3 orthogonal axis:

  • Ease of building a verifier (coding is easy, lab equipment manipulation is hard)
  • Causal complexity in terms of number of confounds (math problems is low as answers don’t depend on external factors, startup success is high complexity as it depends on many random factors)
  • Economic attractiveness (high for coding, low for many domains)

What we’ve seen the first to be automated are domains where building verifiers is easy, causal complexity is less and economic attractiveness is high.

No wonder coding is the first one to see big jump.

But inflated valuations of AI companies need to be justified, so I fully expect that these companies will keep attacking the next best domain they can until they exhaust the economic attractiveness constraint. ...  Read the entire post →

How to coach someone

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Mental Models, Psychology

This essay is part of the series in which I talk about my learnings and insights building a habit coaching app (Nintee) in 2024. It didn’t ultimately work out because an app has marginal influence in a human’s life (v/s that of friends, family, culture and immediate environment). Most apps that work in the category operate like gyms (charge upfront when the motivation is high, and be okay with high churn). I had raised VC funding for it and later it became clear to me that this wouldn’t be a VC scale business, so I shut it down and returned the remaining funding. Hope the insights learned along the way would turn out to be valuable to others. ...  Read the entire post →

How does behavior change happen

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Mental Models, Psychology

This essay is part of the series in which I talk about my learnings and insights building a habit coaching app (Nintee) in 2024. It didn’t ultimately work out because an app has marginal influence in a human’s life (v/s that of friends, family, culture and immediate environment). Most apps that work in the category operate like gyms (charge upfront when the motivation is high, and be okay with high churn). I had raised VC funding for it and later it became clear to me that this wouldn’t be a VC scale business, so I shut it down and returned the remaining funding. Hope the insights learned along the way would turn out to be valuable to others. ...  Read the entire post →

Learning flywheels are all you need

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Syndicated

One intuition pump for the future of AI is to see what happened with human intelligence in our evolutionary past.

Our ancestors 100k years ago had the same cognitive capacity as us (evolution works slowly) and yet all modern technology and knowledge has only emerged in the last 1000 years or so.

Why such a sudden jump?

It’s not because our individual intelligence improved, but that we assembled learning flywheels over time (writing, books, schools, colleges, scientific method) and those caused each individual to be compound over the previous generation leading to the culture explosion that were going through. ...  Read the entire post →

The two views of rationality

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Mental Models, Psychology

This essay is part of the series in which I talk about my learnings and insights building a habit coaching app (Nintee) in 2024. It didn’t ultimately work out because an app has marginal influence in a human’s life (v/s that of friends, family, culture and immediate environment). Most apps that work in the category operate like gyms (charge upfront when the motivation is high, and be okay with high churn). I had raised VC funding for it and later it became clear to me that this wouldn’t be a VC scale business, so I shut it down and returned the remaining funding. Hope the insights learned along the way would turn out to be valuable to others. ...  Read the entire post →

What does your AI dream of?

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Projects

I recently built an open source Chrome extension that scrapes titles of your conversations with Claude and ChatGPT and then asks an AI to imagine a visual that best captures your current state of mind.

So imagine you’re talking about statistics / correlation and when you open up a new tab, you see this:

The project is open source, so you can try it yourself: https://github.com/paraschopra/murmuration

You’ll need an OpenRouter key and note that it may cost ~$5/mo for generating 3 visuals/day with Sonnet 4.6. ...  Read the entire post →

Making a product that Marl loves

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Mental Models, Psychology

This essay is part of the series in which I talk about my learnings and insights building a habit coaching app (Nintee) in 2024. It didn’t ultimately work out because an app has marginal influence in a human’s life (v/s that of friends, family, culture and immediate environment). Most apps that work in the category operate like gyms (charge upfront when the motivation is high, and be okay with high churn). I had raised VC funding for it and later it became clear to me that this wouldn’t be a VC scale business, so I shut it down and returned the remaining funding. Hope the insights learned along the way would turn out to be valuable to others. ...  Read the entire post →