Paras Chopra, Author at Inverted Passion

You cannot plan for happiness (but you can discover it)

January 17, 2019January 21, 2019Paras ChopraPersonal, Psychology

Most of our waking moments are spent either doing things that we expect will make us happy or trying to be happy. It’s like happiness is a currency and we want to hoard it as much as we can, as fast as we can. But the more we chase happiness, the less we’re able to get it. Yet if we momentarily forget about our desire to be happy, we find ourselves to be happy.

Before dissecting this contradictory nature of happiness, it’ll help to first define happiness. Everyone has their pet definition of happiness and each dictionary will define it in its own way. There’s no United Nations mandate specifying ingredients for happiness. It seems that happiness is hard to pin down and, as you’ll see, that’s precisely why you cannot plan for happiness. ... Read the entire post →

Writing is defragging brain

January 4, 2019January 4, 2019Paras ChopraPersonal

I write for myself.

I write when there’s an incredibly hard idea that I need to teach myself. I write when I have a glimpse of an insight that’ll remain hidden until caught and penned down. Writing is a way of having long conversations with myself.

Sometimes I use the double column technique to reason out emotions. Every day I do garbage collection in my mind and dump it on a todo list. I maintain two dairies: one for distilled insights from stuff I’m reading and thinking about, and the second for rough sketches and workings. ... Read the entire post →

Inverted Passion 2018 in Review

December 13, 2018December 13, 2018Paras ChopraPersonal

Last year in December, I decided to take two months off for a sabbatical. What I wanted to do in that period was to write a book on my experience and learnings bootstrapping Wingify to a multi-million dollar SaaS company. What I ended up doing is starting this blog and a community around it. A year later, it’s a perfect time to reflect on this thing which was never planned to be.

Inverted Passion in Numbers

Members in the Slack community: 446
Sessions on the blog: 190 per day
Unique visits to the blog (in one year): 45,000

Best Posts of Inverted Passion

By time spent:

The many wonders of prediction markets (06:50 avg time)
Notes from The Elephant in the Brain (05:42)
Cognitive biases that lead to poorly designed products (05:30)

By # of unique pageviews (in the last 12 months):

Good engineers make terrible leaders (11,716 pageviews)
How to avoid cognitive biases when you get paid to think (5,847)
Why people jump red lights and what it says about startup failure (2,982)

Most Retweeted Threads

1/ Here's a joke: A man standing in the Moscow train station, handing out leaflets. KGB arrests him—but they discover that the leaflets are just blank pieces of paper. “What’s the meaning of this?” they demand. “What is there to write?” replies the man. “It’s so obvious!”. ... Read the entire post →

Why is enterprise software so ugly?

November 23, 2018May 7, 2019Paras ChopraPsychology

The original post was published on Medium. I’m starting to port many of my posts that were published elsewhere to InvertedPassion.

Here’s a design quiz for you. Go through the list of two options shown from the same category and from your first impressions decide which one is better.

Let’s start with office design. Which one do you think is better? What’s your snap judgment?Now video games. From the following shots, which one do you think is better? (You might know these games, but take a first guess from these visuals) ... Read the entire post →

Notes from ‘Nonzero: the logic of human destiny’

October 31, 2018Paras ChopraNotes and Summaries

I make notes of books that really impact my thinking. Earlier, I made notes from The Elephant in the Brain and Skin in the Game. This time I make notes from a book that traces the arc of human history. My notes are not verbatim (unless quoted). It’s mostly what I found illuminating.

1/ Here are my notes from @robertwrighter‘s book – Nonzero: the logic of human destiny. I enjoyed the book very much.

The basic premise of the book is that history has a direction which favors co-operation and non-zero sum games, and that causes an increase in complexity. ... Read the entire post →

The Reverse Turing Test and proof-of-human currency

October 24, 2018October 24, 2018Paras ChopraEconomics, Systems

Are you a bot? No, seriously how can you prove that you are not. How can you prove that you are not some sort of algorithm crawling YouTube videos trying to make sense of this world? And how can you prove that I am not a bot, that I am not one of those Google’s AI?

This question may seem funny, but I find it one of the most important one facing our generation. Actually, the question is less about whether you are a bot or not, it’s more about how can you prove that you are human.

If you prefer watching a video instead of reading, I’ve narrated the entire essay in the following 8 minute video. ... Read the entire post →

Only the paranoid survive

October 8, 2018Paras ChopraBusiness, Personal

Gautam Buddha said life is a suffering but he never explained why is that so. Evolution explains everything so why shouldn’t it explain our tendency to suffer?

I’ve put out a new 5-minute video explanation on this topic.

I tried a newer style of video, which I hope you see as an improvement over previous videos. As always, I appreciate feedback (via email or twitter).

Why do introverts get depressed easily?

September 24, 2018Paras ChopraPsychology

Earlier I’ve written about building mental immunity to prevent depression. Lately, I’ve been very interested in the predictive processing theory of mind, and trying to build has intution about how gets depression takes shape.

I connect a few concepts from evolutionary psychology and predictive processing theory to explore why introverts are more susceptible to depression. Watch the 10-minute video essay below.

In case you prefer text, I tweeted the main ideas from the video as a thread. ... Read the entire post →

Simpson’s paradox, or why your intuition about averages is probably wrong

September 17, 2018Paras ChopraMath, Psychology

I came across Simpson’s paradox in Judea Pearl’s book The Book of Why. It completely changed the way I thought about average statistics such as mean, standard deviation and correlation.

Inspired by that, I explored Simpson’s paradox in a 10-minute video.

I hope you enjoy the video. Leave your comments on Youtube (or on an email to me) if you have feedback.

Why deep neural networks work so well?

September 10, 2018Paras ChopraSystems

Earlier, I had written about machine learning algorithms and how they struggle to do things that a 5-year-old can master: walking, speaking, and drawing.

This time, I go into much more detail and explore a particular type of machine learning algorithm: deep neural networks (DNNs). These brain-inspired algorithms are effective even on “natural world” tasks: translate between languages, drive cars and recognize cats and dogs.

Why do deep neural networks work so well? Where does their magic come from? I explore these questions + more in my new 16-minute video. ... Read the entire post →