Eternally Curious. Tweets are just my refined notes
Bengaluru, India
Joined February 2023
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Was thinking about what a well lived life looks like? After some tinkering with Claude I was able to kind of formulate my points. But before I get to the meat, the answer to this question is surprisingly way less subjective than what people assume. Will share my reasoning below
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My hunch is that the world is getting more and more concentrated everywhere. That is, fewer people/entities are producing and consuming most of the stuff and will continue to do so
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Just look around you. How many of your day to day items do you buy from a nearby grocery store vs ecommerce / quick commerce sites? The top 100 companies produce a humongous amount of stuff compared to others now.
Same on the consumption side as well. Very few people hold most of the wealth. So, this is what I mean by concentration everywhere.
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Let me tell you an absolutely crazy story. It’s not a story though, it’s a real thing.
> So, during the late 11th century, there was a pope called Pope Urban II. He promised that anyone who fought in the first crusade would have their sins’ wiped clean.
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> So far so good. Now comes the interesting part. Over the next centuries, the Church added, “If you can’t fight in the crusade, that's fine, instead you can donate money to the Church and wipe your sins.”
> And the reasoning was, “Jesus and the saints had done far more good deeds than they needed for their own salvation. The surplus was stored in a heavenly treasury, and the Church controlled the withdrawals.”
> I’m sure it’s not just Christianity though. The same has been true in other religions as well, though the form can be different.
History is so crazyy
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I was wondering what really happened in the Middle Ages (roughly 600 CE till the Renaissance in the 14th century). It felt like a blip in the natural evolution of things to me. Like greek philosophy stopped flourishing. People stopped reasoning through things (at least most of them).
Then I found a few counterpoints (sharing below)
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1. Even in Greece, philosophy and logical reasoning were done by only a few elite people. Most Greeks were deeply religious.
2. Philosophy is only possible when you have surplus. When Rome fell, trade stopped, cities emptied and only very few could read.
Just like a starving body shuts down its most expensive organs first. For a civilisation, that organ is philosophy.
3. I thought Church was the main reason for this but it want' that simple. Infact it kinda of helped in preserving and propogating knowledge. Eg., monks and priests kept copying the old Greek texts
4. On the other hand the Islamic world was just as religious, but rich and stable. Baghdad kept Greek thinking alive and built on it.
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‘Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured,’ - Galileo Galilei.
'Solve whatever is verifiable through agents, and make thing verifiable if they are not'
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It's so astonishing that so many Christian thinkers tried to mould Greek philosophy into Christianity.
Plato believed in a separate world of perfect ideas and forms (Platonic world). Augustine said that world was just God’s mind, His plans before creating everything.
Aristotle said everything has a cause, so there must be a first cause that started it all. Aquinas said that first cause is God.
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It's so interesting that evolution and religions have so much in common
Evolution made sex to pass on genes. But that's not the main reason people do it for. They do it love and desire.
Religion also kinda works in the same way. Its broader function is cooperation at scale. But nobody joins for that. They join for answers to suffering and death.
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It’s a very interesting thing to think about how Greek philosophy would have evolved if Christianity had never become a mainstream religion. Greek philosophy was heavily inclined towards reason and understanding, and most religions are based on beliefs.
So, in a counterfactual world where religion had not taken birth, humans would have made progress much faster, I guess.
The below line from the book Sophie’s World made me think of this: “Another date we should notice is 529. That was the year when the church closed Plato’s Academy in Athens. In the same year, the Benedictine order, the first of
the great monastic orders, was founded. The year 529 thus became a symbol of the way the Christian
Church put the lid on Greek philosophy.”
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Opus 5.5 is one of the best model I have used so far. Like far ahead from every other model. Not just complex coding tasks but also day to day conversations also feel so natural with it. I can't even imagine what better means from here
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Yesterday’s @lossfunk talk by @prathoshap made me realise a few things:
1/ We are heading into one of the most uncertain periods in history. It makes sense to be as prepared as possible.
2/ Personally, I feel very excited and I being a generalist, embracing AI tools, and using them to get work done faster is the way forward.
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3/ Avoid big commitments (like buying a house) if you think AI can disrupt your carrier in near term
4/ Have enough financial buffer if things move much faster than you expected say at least 6 months. Thankfully, I have been working towards this from day one, so I don't have to worry much about this one.
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A few other thoughts from the talk:
• If efficiency is the metric you care then AI will be better than very soon in most of the economically valuable stuff
• We are facing a civilizational change. And people have to start talking about it
• Most debates eventually become debates about linguistic terms.,
• What do you tell your 12-year-old to prepare for this world? The best answer which Prothosh himself mentioned is - Learn for the fun of it. Learning purely for a job or survival is over.
• Ownership and intent will remain defensible for some time.
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