All posts in Notes and Summaries

In my experience, entropy as an idea is generally misunderstood. Like many, I had a gut level understanding of “entropy is disorder”. It’s easy to misapply that intuition and draw wrong conclusions about areas far removed from physics (business, economies, cultures, etc.) Remember: thinking in analogies is dangerous?

So, I decided to dive deeper into entropy and here are my notes on the topic (as a series of easily digestible tweets).

1/ A short thread on ENTROPY, and its misapplications

2/ First and foremost, know that there are two different things that are called entropy: one is thermodynamic entropy and the other one is information entropy. Whenever someone is talking about entropy, ask which one.

3/ Thermodynamic entropy: it started with Carnot and Clausius, who defined it as the amount of energy/work absorbed by a system per unit of temperature

4/ Actually, more precisely thermodynamic entropy was defined at a constant temperature and in a reversible process. Roughly it translated to how much energy can go in the system without raising its temperature ...  Read the entire post →

After doing the first unconference in Pune, I and Roby did the second one in Bangalore on March 11th 2018. These are my notes from the event.

Fireside chat with Kunal Shah, Founder of Freecharge (sold for $400mn to SnapDeal)

Here’s the entire audio transcript on Soundcloud. My key insights and learnings from the conversation (we were taking whisky shots while chatting, so when you hear me say ‘shots’ you do the math). Also, eChai has collated many people’s tweets into one page (so

you can read everyone else’s insights from our chat ...  Read the entire post →

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the famous author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, has come up with a new book titled Skin in the Game. I finished it over the weekend and here are my notes.

Insights (and points I agree with him on)

– Human systems are systems within systems, interacting in complex ways. No article / paper / logical argument can capture all interactions of such systems and their evolution over a non-trivial amount of time. So one shot, large scale interventions (such as invasion, UBI, CRISPR) are extremely dangerous because we now have people in power who can order large scale tech-driven interventions across a large section of society.

– People with fuck you money should call out famous or powerful people when they are wrong

– A scientific result takes a slice of the world that’s impossible in reality. Our real world is dynamic, full of interactions and any static slice necessarily misses that

– Time is the ultimate test of robustness.

– It’s safer to describe the past than to predict the future, but if you must predict it, you must share its downside

– When a thing is described, the limitations imposed by the need to hold that concept in mind and communicate it to others isn’t generally recognised as limitations. In reality, the thing (say voters in Bihar) has a history, embedded in other things, interacts with other things and has goals that evolve that itself isn’t aware of. Try communicating all that to others.

– Our perception of roles that people are playing in a system are usually static and short sighted.

We forget. But history doesn’t care. ...  Read the entire post →