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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.

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

🫡 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 →

This year was intense. Perhaps the most intense one in quite a while.

I’ve been gradually developing the habit of reflecting as months and years pass by. In my 20s, I used to think that celebrating birthdays or New Year is pointless. After all, what’s so special about Earth completing one revolution around its star?

Now in my 30s, I know that actually years are all we got. As I see my parents aging and grandparents not being around anymore, the relentless march of time is quite noticeable. I now fully understand that it’ll all be over and even though I can’t lock time in a bottle, I can at least bow and acknowledge as it departs. ...  Read the entire post →

Lately, I’ve been feeling a lack of a well-deliberated, explicit moral code. The world is changing really fast – we have Elon Musk trying to set up a human colony on Mars while Earth’s bio-ecosystem is degrading by the day. So, should I support the investment of resources into making Mars habitable while Earth is gradually becoming unhabitable?

This, obviously, isn’t the only question. Every day, I feel like I need to decide which way to swing on controversial topics. People have strong opinions about things like genetically engineered babies, bitcoin, nuclear power and other new technologies. I know enough about cognitive biases to know that I shouldn’t trust my gut fully on these questions. My gut simply doesn’t know enough to have a good opinion on complex societal issues. Instead of relying on my gut, I need to rely on deliberate thinking to make moral choices. ...  Read the entire post →

In the last year or so, I have been reading on various topics indiscriminately. As I’m discovering connections while reading and thinking, my conviction towards some ideas has grown stronger. I wanted to mention some of such ideas that I suspect are true. I’ll also mention why I feel that way, but you derive your own conclusions.

1/ All matter and collections of matter have subjective experiences

I’m starting to believe that everything has an internal world to it. My belief in (a flavor of) Panpsychism grew stronger because we have evidence of one collection of atoms that has subjective experiences: our brain. Just like we take the evidence of gravity on Earth and project that it holds true everywhere else in the universe, why can’t we take the evidence of our own subjective experience and project it to be true for other collections of matter as well? We, by definition, cannot peek inside an atom to feel what it feels. So proving it or disproving it is hard. In such a case, I feel that the responsibility of providing evidence that an atom doesn’t have feelings (while we know that brain obviously has feelings) falls on strict materialists.  ...  Read the entire post →