Inverted Passion

Be passionate about the territory, not the map

All posts by Paras Chopra

Good engineers make terrible leaders

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Notes and Summaries

Yuval Noah Harari in his highly celebrated book Sapiens says that human values are shared myths and that there is no objective basis in humanism. I agree with him.

In several separate exchanges on Twitter, I’ve debated the claim that technology has caused progress in human society or that there’s never been a better time to live than now.

Itā€™s actually not true. Progress is personal and subjective. For some, mental peace through meditation is progress. For others, increasing religious devotion is progress. Any objective measure of progress implies a moral stance. ...  Read the entire post ā†’

Why people jump red lights and what it says about startup failure

Posted on Author Paras ChopraPosted in Psychology

One of the many things that used to baffle me was people’s behavior that’s evidently harmful to themselves. Take the case of Pune (a city in India where I live). It has simultaneously the lowest rate of helmet adoption and the highest number of two-wheeler casualties. How do you explain that?

Obviously, my confusion was a cognitive bias that impacts many people. It’s the mind projection fallacy: how I think is how other people must also be thinking. It’s an understandable bias as we know no other mind better than ourselves. We have direct access to our thoughts, but for others we can only guess why they’re behaving a certain way. My mistake was that I assumed that if I understand the tradeoff between the cost of wearing a helmet and benefits of avoiding a potential accident (conditioned on how frequently I use a two-wheeler * probability of an accident each time I use it), I’d be foolish not to wear a helmet.  ...  Read the entire post ā†’