Nitin Ganesh

Sophisticated caveman.

Exploring the Twitter terrain for nuanced conversations and actionable ideas.

'Ad Astra Per Aspera'

[Krish Ashok @krishashok]

One unfortunate side effect of short-form social media content is that it has manufactured a hard binary between science and tradition. One is supposed to pick a team. But the real world has never been that tidy, and the history of vitamin deficiency diseases is a truly illustrative story of why trying to understand the world through social media and assuming content is knowledge is one of the silliest things we do

[Sangeet @sangaldoo]

*A guy and a monkey were having tea together"
guy: man, this lemon ginger tea tastes so good
monkey: yep, great lemon tea

[Arun Krishnan 🇮🇳 @ArunKrishnan_]

Children MUST take care of their parents in their old age. This is a hill I am comfortable dying on.

Last evening, at a wedding. Appa feels sleepy and tired. Amma wants to talk to people. So I brought him back to the hotel, help him get changed, and get into bed and stayed with him.
I thought back to how many days he would have done the same for me duringy childhood. It was now my turn.

[Danish Hussain @astrodanish]

In most professions, when you hit the 90th percentile in technical skill, the best use of your time is getting 90th percentile soft skills

the best barbers are therapists

the best photographers are comedians

the best engineers are iconoclastic cult leaders that inspire their team with a vision nobody else can see, and even fewer can beleive

stop maxing out your CAD skills, and start dreaming bigger!

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

The more you try to force someone to believe something, the more you activate their defenses.

Because people are not empty containers waiting to be filled with correct information. People are living systems. They have histories, loyalties, fears, incentives, identities, wounds, dreams, status games, private griefs, social contexts, sacred objects, sunk costs, and an entire internal parliament of voices arguing all day long.

When you “persuade” someone, you are not installing software, you are entering an ecology.

And ecologies do not respond well to bulldozers.

[Mubbu @wizofecom]

Had a wealthy friend tell me that the ability to decrease time to any outcome is the one skill behind every successful person he knows.

A few I apply constantly:

- Decreasing the time it takes you to get out of a bad state will make you emotionally resilient

- Decreasing the time it takes you to go from idea to executive will make you wealthy

- Decreasing the time it takes you to turn a failure into a lesson will thicken your skin faster than anything else

[reframe n’ aim @reframenaim]

Good banter is intellectual stimulation. You can tell so much about a person by the way they engage in banter or if they can even engage with it at all.

[David Perell @david_perell]

Maria Popova is famous for her personal blog, The Marginalian, where she's published more than six million words.

All the nights I've spent reading her writing were like an entry point into intellectual curiosity. She's introduced me to more writers and ideas than just about anybody, and this conversation is about how she does it.

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
00:37 Why writers should visit archives
04:39 Lessons from reading diaries
09:41 Letters vs diaries
11:35 Presence over productivity
18:30 How language shapes thought
19:48 Why Maria started reading poetry
36:46 Why college failed her
39:58 Reading to survive
41:41 Why epiphanies don’t stick
43:57 Thoughts on famous quotes
47:32 Why AI can never make art
53:10 Stop calling it content

I've shared the full interview with Maria Popova below. If you'd rather watch it on YouTube, or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets.

[Sehrishhh @drbigbrowneyes]

the scarier side of communication is, "i messed up. i wronged you, i accept that. but im not willing to lose you so tell me what to do to fix it." it takes courage to admit that even to yourself, let alone another person. and if you genuinely fear losing someone, you will do it.

[goma @soigomaa]

Fun fact: inconsistent reinforcement is one of the strongest ways to create attachment.
It's the same psychological pattern used in gambling unpredictability keeps you hooked.

[kache @yacineMTB]

you can outsource your thinking
but you cannot outsource your understanding

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

Ask yourself: “what am I actually trying to accomplish, and is this game the most effective path to that?” Not “how do I win this game?” but “should I be playing it at all?” This question is surprisingly rare, because the game’s existence creates a powerful illusion of necessity.

[Simon Sarris @simonsarris]

everything in the world carries a thin film of inertia and you can pierce it

[Vacha @TVachaW]

Tibetan Buddhists sometimes call the discursive thinking mind the “superstitious mind.”

I think it’s a great description as it points to how many of our thoughts, feelings and actions are basically just rituals.

We think that if we feel a lot of fear about the future, that will somehow protect us.

We think that if agonize over a million different options, that will somehow ensure we pick the right one.

There are even certain rituals we think we must perform become we can allow each ourselves to be happy:

Before we are happy we must have the right partner, the right friends, the right achievements, the right experiences.

But this is all superstition.

Having those things is no more intrinsically connected to happiness than doing a rain dance is to rainfall.

The connection comes only from the self-fulfilling projections we cast upon these things as part of our rituals.

Much of the world we experience is a hallucination.

We construct worlds out of our thoughts and emotions then grasp after and recoil from these self-made hallucinations.

Modern society considers itself to be very unsuperstitious.

But we haven’t really stopped being superstitious.

We’ve mostly just started performing our superstitious rituals in the privacy of our own minds.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

There's a physicist at Stanford named Safi Bahcall who modeled this exact principle and the math is wild.

He calls it "phase transitions in human networks." When you're stationary, your probability of a lucky event is limited to your existing surface area: the people you already know, the places you already go, the ideas you've already been exposed to. Your opportunity window is fixed.

When you move, your collision rate with new nodes in a network increases nonlinearly. Double your movement (new conversations, new cities, new projects) and your probability of a serendipitous encounter doesn't double. It roughly quadruples. Because each new node connects you to their entire network, not just to them.

Richard Wiseman ran a 10-year study at the University of Hertfordshire tracking self-described "lucky" and "unlucky" people. The single biggest differentiator wasn't IQ, education, or family money. Lucky people scored significantly higher on one trait: openness to experience. They talked to strangers more, varied their routines more, and said yes to invitations at nearly twice the rate.

The "unlucky" group followed the same routes, ate at the same restaurants, and talked to the same 5 people. Their networks were closed loops. No new inputs, no new collisions.

Luck isn't random. Luck is surface area. And surface area is a function of movement.

The lobster emoji is doing more work than most people realize. Lobsters grow by shedding their shell when it gets too tight. The growth requires a period of total vulnerability. No protection, no armor, soft body exposed to the ocean.

That's the cost of movement nobody posts about. You have to be uncomfortable first. The new shell only hardens after you've already moved.

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

High-agency people seem to have this weird immunity to embarrassment.

Getting rejected? Not embarrassing, that’s just data collection.

Looking naive? Not embarrassing, that’s just information asymmetry you’re fixing.

Breaking minor social rules? Not embarrassing, most rules are just Schelling points anyway.

What would be embarrassing to them is not trying. That’s the thing they can’t live with.

[Sanjeev Sanyal @sanjeevsanyal]

Never underestimate the one who seems to have fallen behind the herd, he may just be looking for a permanent solution

[Parimal @Fintech03]

The innate refusal to crawl off a cliff is an exact physical manifestation of what Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras call Abhinivesha.

Abhinivesha is the 5th Klesha (affliction): it is the instinctive clinging to life & the fear of death that is found even in the most learned scholars & newborn infants.

Ancient Indian psychology argued that this fear is not learned in this lifetime; it is a residue (Samskara) of survival. The fact that a few months old baby, who has never fallen off a cliff, refuses to cross the glass is the scientific proof of Abhinivesha, an embedded code in the Human GUI that prioritizes survival over curiosity.

[PS @dostoevesque]

There’s no need to be afraid of any scenario in life, because it isn’t personal and it isn't the first time some has found themselves in such a scenario. It’s structural. The ego wants dramatic suffering. It wants its pain to be mythic. But most suffering is procedural. It’s part of the design of being alive.

You are not uniquely cursed. You are not cosmically targeted. You are simply next in line. Because if your problem is not divinely customized, then it is ordinary. And if it is ordinary, it is survivable. Millions before you have stood in this same queue. They felt the same dread. They thought it was the end. It wasn’t.

[Visakan Veerasamy @visakanv]

the yin-yang theory of everything:
people want a little outside in their inside
a little inside in their outside
a little hot when it’s cold
a little cold when it’s hot
a little light when it’s dark
a little dark when it’s light
etc etc