Delighted to close the year with the publication of my book "Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi's Schools". This book is an effort to bring the voices of the frontline state - block officers, teachers, health workers - into the debate on state capacity in India (1/10) 🧵
@piyushgaarg Would love to know how this turns out for you.
The more I think, the more I realise the need to come up with different mechanisms for nurturing and building new adult friendships.
@rishpardikar Curious to know if there are any government/philanthropic/etc funding incentives for academia to study long term impact. It seems to be the opposite in India.
# on shortification of "learning"
There are a lot of videos on YouTube/TikTok etc. that give the appearance of education, but if you look closely they are really just entertainment. This is very convenient for everyone involved : the people watching enjoy thinking they are learning (but actually they are just having fun). The people creating this content also enjoy it because fun has a much larger audience, fame and revenue. But as far as learning goes, this is a trap. This content is an epsilon away from watching the Bachelorette. It's like snacking on those "Garden Veggie Straws", which feel like you're eating healthy vegetables until you look at the ingredients.
Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn't have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that "10 minute full body" workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It's not that the quickie doesn't do anything, it's just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn.
I find it helpful to explicitly declare your intent up front as a sharp, binary variable in your mind. If you are consuming content: are you trying to be entertained or are you trying to learn? And if you are creating content: are you trying to entertain or are you trying to teach? You'll go down a different path in each case. Attempts to seek the stuff in between actually clamp to zero.
So for those who actually want to learn. Unless you are trying to learn something narrow and specific, close those tabs with quick blog posts. Close those tabs of "Learn XYZ in 10 minutes". Consider the opportunity cost of snacking and seek the meal - the textbooks, docs, papers, manuals, longform. Allocate a 4 hour window. Don't just read, take notes, re-read, re-phrase, process, manipulate, learn.
And for those actually trying to educate, please consider writing/recording longform, designed for someone to get "sweaty", especially in today's era of quantity over quality. Give someone a real workout. This is what I aspire to in my own educational work too. My audience will decrease. The ones that remain might not even like it. But at least we'll learn something.
It starts as an AI friend to share jokes with and ends as an LLM trained on your ex-wife who left you, or your deceased father, or the best friend who cancer took too soon. People you are not strong enough to choose to grieve. You never release your attachment to them, so you never come apart for a black, fractured year and slowly rebuild yourself, figuring out who you are in their absence. Your perfectly curated thicket of digital fantasies and relationships is just good enough to withdraw into, day after day, year after year. So your body swims in a sea of unexpressed mourning. And soon your mind, acutely aware that it has lost something but unable to remember what, sinks so deeply into its own murk that you don't see your life closing down around you, reduced to its barest, saddest functions, bereft of spontaneity and delight and the fresh wounds of love. Because you could not face death, you will no longer be able to face life.
It is far better to embrace loneliness, to develop your capacities for solitude and try to find satisfaction in whatever meager connections are available to us in this sad, bizarre age. The alternative is a quandary that has haunted addicts and the mentally ill since before memory: a cloud of denial and sorrow so thick that your life remains tragically unlived, up until the day it comes to an unforeseen and unceremonious end.
@sidagarwal Weird! Generally for similar scams the OTP is not actually an OTP sent by them but a banking OTP or something and people end up giving that.
No clue what is the motivation here.