so pharmacology has to work around this by finding other similar molecules or molecules with some other mechanism that achieves the same object.

eudaimonic on the other hand refers to a more long-term well being that focuses on purpose, internal values and self-actualisation. it requires working hard and facing challenges.

all of any one type is harmful. if all you do is pursue hedonic pleasure, which many people are now tricked into doing by the algorithms of modern society, then you develop tolerance. hedonic pleasures are intense but short-lived, drugs being the most extreme example. the human body wasn’t evolved for these kinds of intense hedonic activities. in order to maintain homeostasis, the human brain develops tolerance for these kind of substances or activities.

tolerance is developed by multiple ways but one way is by downregulation of receptors. take the famous/infamous dopamine. when you engage in high dopamine activites, the brain releases a lot of dopamine and in order to maintain homeostasis the brain decreases the amount of receptors. receptors are like locks and dopamine is they key. so afterwards when you do the same activity, you don’t feel the same happiness because there are less receptors available to activate.

on the other hand just doing eudaimonic isn’t good either. it leads to burnout and cortisol increase, etc.

the balance seems to lie somewhere around 70-30. 70% of eudaimonic happiness but also 30% hedonic happiness to prevent burnout and getting the motivation to push.

maybe the 5 day workweek isn’t such a bad idea then.

the book is The Art of Bitfulness by Nandan Nilekani and Tanuj Bhojwani.

• port blair, capital of andaman and nicobar islands did not have internet till 2020. a friend of the author visited the place in 2017 and remarked about how since no one had internet, people talked and socialed with each other.
  • this is game theory. now that everyone has phones and internet all the time, the opportunity cost when talking to a stranger has increased. you do not know how the people you’re trying to with will react, so everyone just always stays on their phones.
  • there are places where socialisation is easier and it just boils down to how comfortable people feel about approaching others. i think people’s tolerance for being rejected has decreased.
  • there are places that mandate no phones such as vipaasna but they are meant for meditation and do not allow interaction with others. what is a great idea is to have resorts where no phones are allowed and i’m sure they exist. it’s difficult but i think people will be surprised once they try it.
• Our smartphones encourage a behaviour where we instantly act on our every fleeting whim.
• There’s far too much information in our environments for our brain to meaningfully absorb.
  • this is true. think about our ancestors. the amount of information they probably had in a week, we can consume in an hour.
  • long term memory requires playing with the information for long periods of time. which is why books are nice. even though they might not be informatically dense, because they require you to read over multiple days and maintain context, you learn better from a book than from just reading a blog. although you can actively read a blog and try out the things it says and write your own thoughts about it and that will also lead to efficient learning.
  • its also why you can scroll through social media for hours and remember nothing. because memory formation takes time.
• The critical idea in mindfulness is not to look at a wandering mind as something inherently good or bad. It is something that simply is. What matters is our persistent but gentle effort to bring our minds back to the present moment.
  • mindfulness is a good habit to have. it is learnable like all other skills. do mindful meditation. it enables top down control from the prefrontal cortex so that you’re more frequently aware of your cravings and emotions and can regulate them better instead of being driven by them.
• Before the internet, there were barriers to how we could consume that information.
  • basically there were natural separated environments. for reading you went to the library, for entertainment you had TV, etc. now you have everything on your phone and so you can be distracted even while you’re working or studying.
• Studies have shown that excess choice not only produces a ‘choice paralysis’ but even for those who do choose, it reduces satisfaction with their choices.
  • choice overload. the brain never in the history before had to choose from so many choices. chocolate hazelnut, belgium chocolate, double chocolate, dark chocolate, chocolate peanut butter. also sidenote about how other countries tend to have many flavours for lays, dairy milk, etc. that are not available in india. i do not know the reason.
  • the second part of the sentence is even more worrying. more choices leads to reduced satisfaction. and makes sense. i like chocolate and if an ice cream shop only has chocolate and vanilla, i’ll be satisfied with my choice. but if a shop has 10 different chocolate flavours, even if i like my chosen flavour, my mind will think about whether the other flavours could have tasted better. this is not something much to worry about with chocolates. but now we have the same massive possible set for careers, for spouse, for cities to settle in, etc. gratitude is one solution. but this is a modern problem. hunter gatherers didn’t have much option for these choices. you were limited to geography for the set of spouses. there were no careers, you had to do all tasks one had to, to survive. there were no airplanes, so you couldn’t worry about what could’ve been if you had chosen that foreign university instead.
• We end up dissatisfied because we spend more time deciding what we’d like than liking what we’ve decided.
  • basically gratitude.
• Cognitive effort is known to be hard.
  • learning is hard and if you’re trying to learn a difficult thing, you’ll feel that cognitive pain and irritation.
• More people play slot machines than any other game in casinos. Slot machines constitute about 70% of the average US Casino’s revenue.
  • this was something i wouldn’t have guessed.
• ….’get in the zone’. … a mental state in which time falls away, space falls away, sense of monetary value disappears… you’re just in that loop with the machine. Every other game - horse racing, roulette, blackjack - has natural pauses that give you time to reconsider.
  • this makes sense. the brain in the other games has moments to pause where it can become aware. think about when you binge watch a series and are in the zone but the buffering starts and you stare at your disappointed face reflected from the black screen. that makes you aware, that you’ve been binge watching. social media apps now are so smooth that they, like slot machines, get you in the zone. when you’re in the zone, your awareness goes away and you can end up scrolling for hours. only when you receive a call or are distrubed otherwise do you realise that you’ve been scrolling since.
  • so the solution is to have reminders and barriers that inform you whenever social media or other distractions get you in the zone. so you can actively decide to go away after a period of time.
• We reach for the apps or news feeds that make us lose a sense of space and time.
  • the zone can be relieving if you’re going through a hard phase of life.
• When it comes to addiciton, we tend to focus on two things - the addict and the substance. There is a third factor we often fail to consider - the environment.
  • so true this. i’ve come to realise that systems and environment are what’ll get you through. willpower is useless. human brain cannot fight against the power of modern technology. you need to have systems in place.
• the internet when it was new hadn’t figured out the revenue model. the pivotal point was when people realised that advertising could be a model.
• This moment is now considered by many when the internet went from a collective project to a commercial project.
• Global spending on digital advertising was … 50% of all advertising spend globally in 2019.
• What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
  • the paradox of abundance. as access to all kinds of food has made the average population worse off by making them obese but the right tail of fit people have become even fitter because they now have access to healthier food. same with information. the average person is worse off, but the smartest will become smarter.
  • it is time for us to consciously consume information instead of passively consuming whatever the algorithm throws at us. its called fishing vs hunting.
• In effect, lack of payments infrastructure on the early web has led us to our current attention and data hungry internet.
• The next time you’re playing an opponent having a hot streak, ask them ‘what are you doing so differently that’s making your forehand so good today’. Most opponents will take it as a compliment … their mind is now paying attention to the very thing you asked about. Their effortless hot streak will falter as they try to put conscious effort into their shots.
  • basically atheletes play best when playing effortlessly. asking them a question about what they’re doing differently will invoke their cognitive resources that will make them play worse.
• in a research, people who had phones in the other room performed better than people who had phones in the same room, even though they could not use it. Your conscious mind isn’t thinking about that smartphone, but that process - the process of requiring yourself to not think about something - takes up some of your limited cognitive resources.
• Being mindful means being aware…. being aware of one’s own state of mind.
• … our brain aboud the potential negative mood by avoiding doing the task altogethor.
• Screen time has increased…. It has absorbed all those idle pockets of time when we normally would have thought about hard problems.
  • this is called the default mode network of the brain. it becomes active when we’re bored and it is necessary because the brain starts making random connection during this phase. which is why you have a lot of ideas at the shower or at walks.
  • what we’ve done is that we’ve reduced boredom from our lives. things that naturally allowed boredom, such as commute are now spent with headphones in ears listening to music or watching series. this was very visible during my local trains commute in Mumbai. i guess before mobiles and internet, people would talk to each other on the trains or read newspapers/books. now everyone has earphones on.
  • be bored.
• Journalling reduces stress,…gratitude journals… boost happiness.
• ….writing, it lets you see our own thinking evolve with time.
  • this is so true. you’ll be wildly surprised when you read your journals from 3-4 years ago. feels like your past self was a different person sometimes.
• …he uses a note-taking software to record the highlights of every conversation he has had with people throughout the day.
  • i learnt how crucial and impactful active listening is when i was in a hostel. i realised that irrespective of wealth, intellect, etc, everyone had problems and wanted other people to listen to them. problems are like air, the wealthy can be equally distressed for wearing a wrong dress as a poor is when hungry. the brain doesn’t really care if the problem is actual or first-world, it worries the same way.
  • i had learnt somewhere about an impactful habit which is noting down points about people in the contact of your phone. and then if you tell them that years later, it hits them hard. how could someone remember something about myself for so long they think. impactful habit this.
• name folders with project name _ date _ other details. make the name exhaustive so retrieval is easier.
• completion bias…. we get into a habit of only doing the easy things while hard things get sicker.
• …his studies show that when we think of our future selves, the same regions of the brain get activated as when we think about strangers.
  • this is difficult. the trade-off between living for the present self vs living for the future self.
• Do the important tasks first, not last. Whatever time remains, can be spent guilt-free.
  • i learnt something similar yesterday from a blogpost. it said do the most important thing first thing in the morning so that even if the rest of day is wasted, you’re still moving everyday.
  • what i’ve implemented is i write down the night before what i think is the most important and then i do that next day. today is the first day and writing this was my first task.
• writing down exactly what you’re going to do makes you more likely to do so. write i’ll do x at place y at time z.
• Ultimately, time is zero-sum.
  • ah, the most difficult constraint of life. some argue that the constraint is what makes life valuable. that if we were immortal, nothing would be valuable and important. i don’t know.
• The maximum resistance we feel towards doing anything comes right at the start.
  • the 2 minute rule. when you don’t have the motivation to do anything. just say to your brain you’ll do it for 2 minutes.
• You have permission to do nothing, but you do not have permission to do anything else.
  • richard feynman’s mother would do this. she would lock her in a room with a book. she told feynman she was allowed to not read the book. but since there was nothing else in the room to stimulate one with, feynman would naturally be attracted to the book after a while.
• a way to treat phone addiction, is to keep it at a desk where there are no chairs, or seats nearby. so you’re forced to keep standing while using the phone.
• set up multiple virtual user accounts for different purposes.
• Ulysses pacts…. present self was a better decision maker than the future self.
  • this is an amazing technique. the brain is fallible. don’t rely on willpower. create systems that don’t let you fall when your brain is vulnerable.
• Subscribe to newsletters using a separate mail id only for that.
• Instapaper app for reading later. amazing app and I’ve been using it since a month.
• don’t passively consume on the internet. create content and share ideas.
• Isolation increases the levels of cortisol… in pigs and in monkeys, just as in humans.
• For every website you visit, your internet service provider will know where you’ve been.
• there are virtual numbers available for OTPs just like temporary mail ids.
• Tor is the safest browser, but also the slowest.
• Your ISP is the bottleneck to all your internet usage….The ISPs can see the address of the VPN but will not know your final destination.
• Researchers at Facebook found…..emotions increase engagements…. ‘emotional contagion’, when users were shown positive content, their own posts were more positive and vice versa.
• We update our beliefs based on the world we see online and forget that it does not represent the real world but a collection deliberately selected to get a reaction out of us.
  • the algorithms decide your information diet.
• Make a simple social to do list with names of the person. send messages and talk with them. lifo basis.
• …‘degenerate feedback loop’. Based on a guess, the algortithm selects for you content that you think you’ll like. Even if you don’t like it, you end up going through it and engaging with some. This reinforces the algorithm.
• Collaborative filtering. i was wondering whether we could use these algorithms for spouse matchmaking. a problem with a decent impact i guess. why are there no startups around this. gather data, which the apps already do. they know us more than we might know about ourselves. then they suggest partners which we’re most likely to be compatible with. a great idea i think.
• blitzscaling… the model is to scale at any cost or try perishing.
• self fullfilling loop of raising funds. a founder may want organic growth and no dishonest campaigns but will be forced to do so after raising funds.
• search for newly funded startups. they might be offering products at even lower than costs funded by VCs trying to capture the market.
• The result of [blitzscaling] in the long run, one way or another, is concentration.
• Tech companies like regulation once they are big, because they impose disproportionately larger costs on those smaller than them.
• Regulators are slow by design, whereas startups move with blitz.
• The underlying principle is that instead of trusting a single authority, cryptocurrencies use some form of a consensus algorithm amongst a group of decentralized peers.
• Aadhar was an amazing innovation. Solving multiple problems. Only 15 paise out of 1Rs intended by the government as money to the poor would reach the intended person. Middleman would eat the rest before.
• 400 million internal immigrant workers, who travel to other districts for seasonal employment.
• There are more than 1.5 mil schools, 10 mil teachers and 250 mil students.

these consequences can be good or bad, and small or huge. say for example the cobra effect - when the british goverernment decided to award people money for each tail of a snake they got in. instead of killing the snakes, people bred more snakes to cut their tales and earn money.

this was a consequence that was not taken into account by the decision makers. each of us has a huge set that goes by the name of ‘unknown unknowns’ and which means that if we make decisions that are to affect a complex system over a long period of time, there have to be multiple consequences that we can’t even take into account because we do not know that we do not know those.

neural networks cannot be adjusted selectively, because each of their weights carry information. if you train a neural net on cats vs dogs and then train it again on cars vs trucks, it’ll simply forget the knowledge of cats vs dogs.

the post says that the same thing probably occurs with the brain. we have an old brain, old relative to the exponential economic growth. it is difficult to change the ancestral limbic system so the solution is to add additional layers at the end that can monitor what the limbic system is trying to do.

maybe this is what mindfulness meditation is afterall. training the neocortex to be aware of what the limbic system is trying to do.

this is an interactive lesson on graph theory.

i’ve learnt it before but never hurts to revisit and strengthen the neurons.

takeaways/notes -

1. an euler graph can have no more than 2 odd vertices.
2. the euler formula v + f - e = 2
3. complete and bipartite graphs
4. planar graphs are those that do not contain a K5 or K3,3 inside them.
5. facebook found 3.5 average degrees of separation.

it is genuinely interesting. this figure of 3.5. makes me wonder why i don’t exploit this enough. so called “network”. linkedin surely has even lesser degrees of separation because people connect with random people there whereas in facebook, you only connect with your known friends.

linkedin must have even a lesser degree of separation which in a way doesn’t even make much sense because you can always send a connection request directly to someone. in other words you can reduce the degree of separation to anyone to 1.

now obviously its not that easy. how big of a favour someone is willing to do is inversely proportional to the degree of separation. the actual separation, not that you can connect with any stranger on linkedin then ask them to do you a big favour.

so if we look at actual degrees of separation, what reduces it is when people become more social. i don’t have the data for india but the west is becoming more lonely, which means the average degree of separation is increasing.

what can also decrease the degree is when people start having decentralized friend groups. as in if i have a closed group of 100 friends, then while it might be a lot of fun, it increases the degree. instead if i know 5 people each from 20 different groups, i’ll bring down the average degree.

making decisions is difficult in the 21st century. one of the reasons i believe why is the paradox of choice, or choice paralysis. what exponential economic growth has now made available is the option to quite literally be able to do anything.

this wasn’t the case for most of human history. most humans that have ever lived, lived most of their lives 20-30km within their birthplace. there was no finance, or engineering or law or accounting. agriculture and hunter gathering was what there all was. in a way you didn’t even have to make career decisions. there was just that and you did just that.

now we live in wildly different times. decision making is difficult. i am no master at it.

one technique that we can borrow from mathematics is what’s called gradient ascent. gradient ascent is an unconstrained optimisation technique.

think of it this way. imagine life is a terrain and the goal is to climb as high as possible. what gradient ascent says in simple terms is that you stop where you’re standing and look at the terrain around you. then you choose the direction that takes you upwards the steepest at this point. then you reach a new point and you repeat this process.

what this assumes -

1. that you know the terrain around you. this is most definitely wrong. one of the most limiting factors in our decision making process, i believe, is the set of unknown unknowns. choices you don’t even know you exist. therefore what we’re working with in real life is a terrain that is only half visible. you can choose only from your set of knowns.

and the classic problem with this is reaching local maximas instead of global maximas. what if, from the point you’re standing at, the ascent takes you to a local maxima, but that if you had instead chosen descent for some period of time, you could’ve reached the global maxima instead? theoretically reaching the global maxima is difficult. this i say because the domain of choices is huge now.

i think then what mindfulness and gratitude practices do is increasing the value of the happiness function across the whole domain. so that your new local maxima is better than your older local maxima.

definitely mindfulness and gratitude increase happiness and well-being. that’s well researched. the question then is the quantum of gain in well-being from those activities vs the gain from changing the local maximas.

i asked llm to tell me the neuroscience about this and it told me this -

1. the basal ganglia is the part of the brain responsible for habits. once habits are formed it doesn’t take much effort for the brain.
2. in order to create new habits or break old ones, it is required to activate the prefrontal cortex and override the basal ganglia.
3. updating the log daily gives dopamine boosts.
4. the fear of failing in public activated the anterior cingulate cortex - the region of the brain responsible for processing pain.

so i’m going to make this page a public accountability ledger. i’ll update daily and never modify past entries except for formatting.

self discipline is not so easy so the way credibility will be ensured is through the following methods -

1. git has a commit history - meaning that it records every edits made in the file. each week i’ll post screenshots showing that i did not make any editing entries.
2. the self must not be relied on and enough friction points must be made so that the neocortex has enough time to engage the top down executive function and override the impulsive limbic system. so to ensure i do not delete this page - i’ll also weekly archive this webpage with the wayback machine.

the system atleast for now looks foolproof. the only thing to do is to ensure that i update the log daily. so important to make the edits easy and fast to reduce friction for the brain.

habit definitions

1. mindfulness - do one activity of the healthy minds project app
2. exercise - either strength or jogging
3. reading - reading atleast a couple pages of a book
4. no dopamine flooding activity - no social media or short form content or anything of the like. if using social media, active hunting for knowledge and not getting carried away by the algorithm in the infinite scroll.

Y denotes that i performed the habit that day, except for the last habit where Y means i did not engage in cheap dopamine.

N denotes that i did not perform the habit.

intrigued by this idea, i asked gemini to provide more examples for it. and one of the examples it gave was the hirshleifer effect. the effect states that information reduces the total utility of a society by removing insurance.

consider this example - a hypothetical city has 5 banks and a group of robbers. the robbers rob 1 bank at random each year. to safeguard them from the losses, all 5 banks take up insurance. this distributes the risk from a single bank to each bank. suppose that this year the robbers declare that they’ll be robbing bank 2. this is additional information. the uncertainity is gone. but what has happened now is that because the other banks know that they are not going to be robbed this year, they do not take the insurance. afterall, why pay premium for an event that you know will not happen. so the end result is that bank 2 has to bear all the cost of the robbery.

the additional information - which decreased the uncertainity, caused potential insurance buyers to not take the policy.