joyojeet pal

ঘোড়ার ডিম

[joyojeet pal @joyopal]

Thing about the Indian education system, a teacher will throw a chalk at your head and say "If I wake you up in the middle of the night, you must give me correct defintion of external and internal validity!"

And somehow you expect that to be a moment of clarity. But it won't be.

[newslaundry @newslaundry]

The idea of US exceptionalism has fallen to the outside world. But within the US, a conflict is simmering as a mercurial leader tries to redefine it.

Enter ICE.

✍️ @joyopal

https://t.co/PxDLbkkqcf

[Rukmini S @Rukmini]

- The top occupations of salaried workers in India are not the skilled jobs that I had pictured

[joyojeet pal @joyopal]

In discussing career paths I told my two kids that they can do an engineering degree and in the process also also do math, "kill two birds with one stone."

One of them is distraught while the other has been trying to calculate how to bounce the stone off a tree to get both birds

[joyojeet pal @joyopal]

The question is who will put the transcript through an LLM so that someone whose IQ ends at a tweet can understand it

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Mark Carney’s outstanding Davos speech. His best speech yet, I think!
Here it is in full.

[joyojeet pal @joyopal]

Trump approval in US show significant share of Americans are on board with what is happening both within the US and in its foreign engagements.

I drew up the stats - this is the highest approval from Republicans at this stage in last 20 yrs & the most divided Americans have been

[RealClearPolling @RCPolling]

Trump, Obama, Bush Approval on January 14, Second Term Year 2

🔴Trump: 43.8%
🔴Bush: 42.2%
🔵Obama: 41.9%

[joyojeet pal @joyopal]

Since this is grading season and a range of my students are complaining about scoring 92 instead of 93, here is my score sheet from my second year of college.

[joyojeet pal @joyopal]

Someone gotta address the trauma of these damn children's cooking shows.

Where's the support group for parents of children who are into kitchen experiments?

[naresh fernandes @tajmahalfoxtrot]

Gillian Tindall (1938-2025): Murali Ranganathan on the Bombay biographer who opened the city’s eyes to its own stories https://t.co/NTlmQgK0oE

[Matt Bruenig @MattBruenig]

This does not seem democratic to me

[Ambarish Satwik @AmbarishSatwik]

Shower thought. First contact etiquette when you finally meet aliens: if the eyes face forward, flee. If the eyes are on the side, you can give the creature a hug. Eyes that face forward on a skull suggest a predator. The frontal gaze is not admiration. Forward facing eyes allow for binocular or stereoscopic vision, which allows an animal to see and judge depth. It’s evolved for the pounce.

Eyes that are located on the side of its head would (in most cases) suggest a prey animal. Side eye placement gives greater peripheral or side vision. Allows the animal to see predators approaching from the side as well as from behind.

Can’t remember how many movies get this taxonomy right. Hollywood has been producing extraterrestrials who, by the eye rule, don’t know whether they want to eat us or apply for asylum. No predator in nature has ever needed 360 degree surveillance. You don’t need to see behind you when you are the thing behind everybody else.

[joyojeet pal @joyopal]

A slide from one of our talks which highlights exactly this. The new requirement for legitimating what counts as a public intellectual is whether they are also an influencer. In time, this will be the new metric, not citation count.

[Sabah @_sabahgurmat]

I write about how the Public Intellectual is being replaced by influencers, podcasters & dialogue as infotainment today.
As academics remain in jails, media switches to podcasts/reels/TikTok & public universities crack down on events, something’s changed:
https://t.co/eWWKgapeYf

[Ramachandra Guha @Ram_Guha]

Appreciating a fellow historian: my column in ⁦@ttindia⁩ https://t.co/PxMlIYwYl9

[joyojeet pal @joyopal]

"when a science or commerce guy criticises top humanities and social science scholars, you know how mediocre they are in their own fields; and the vice-versa"

[Achyut Chetan @achyutchetan]

When Amartya Sen won the Nobel for Economics, many of his ideas, and less technical essays, started coming down from the high academic world to common readers. After casually flipping through them, a friend of mine, an IITian, and hence considered brilliant by everyone (including himself), told me that there is nothing great about his work, and anyone could do all that development thinking: a bit of probability, elementary mathematics, a lot of rhetoric, choice, equality and other everyday words. In other words, even a low-ranking engineering graduate from a mediocre Engineering College (In 1998, there were no world rankings of institutions, but in 2011, IIT Kanpur was ranked somewhere below 250 in the world), could presume that he was intellectually superior to a Nobel Prize winner in a social science discipline.

Through some strange twists, the Francesca Orsini affair has sparked a war of disciplines––more accurately, an assault on the humanities and social sciences––on social media and other platforms. It's a caricature of what CP Snow had once called the battle between "The Two Cultures". For it to be a genuine war, we need the best practitioners of both 'cultures' speaking to each other, understanding one another, and THEN critiquing each other. In an age of superspecialization, that seems hardly possible, and that is quite understandable.

I have no way of proving it, but I know it by intuition, that the best in any field will not berate the best in another field, even if their own ideas lead to very different conclusions. While we celebrate Dante's Ptolemaic geocentric world in his great epic, we do not say Copernicus and Gallileo, and the whole of modern science is a mere superstition. Tagore and J C Bose were friends, but Bose never wanted to write a lyric, and Tagore never wanted to do science. There were many challenges to Freud, including some from his own disciples, but Einstein never questioned Freud's intellect. So when a science or commerce guy criticises top humanities and social science scholars, you know how mediocre they are in their own fields; and the vice-versa.

[Malini Ranganathan @maliniranga]

I penned this piece with @Rathod_Sachi on caste, climate, and labor migration from Bihar to Bengaluru for a new magazine that platforms anti-caste writing and multimedia work. https://t.co/RVpWmyAvce

[joyojeet pal @joyopal]

@satishs kiss cheez se bhaag raha hain....

[joyojeet pal @joyopal]

Here is a link to the piece (which also links to the older piece about Chandrachud). You can pretty much look up accounts that drove the attack on Chandrachud in 2023 and see what they were saying about Gavai. Shoe thrower has some serious friends.

https://t.co/J6vDCNyUmn

[joyojeet pal @joyopal]

In 2023, we did a piece on online attacks on CJI Chandrachud by social media influencers. Since there is a conversation on whether the attack on Gavai was organic or driven by influencers.

Here side by side, are attacks on CJIs - 2023 to 2025. No surprises, same accounts.