Pareen's Blog

This is what they are saying, and what I think.

1. It is the next WWDC: No it is not. No innovative products or tech here.
2. India found its Elon Musk: You’re comparing someone who is pushing humanity forward to someone who is bringing lagging technology and making a monopoly deal in India
3. 5G: Don’t get me started on this
4. Glass: Really? No. Culture creates great tech products. This is a gimmick to get tech bloggers wet
5. One day, we will look at how this was a fire sale for everything and the creation of a bully monopoly. Remember what they did to most media houses
6. Game: US vs. China. Battleground: India. This is the right lens to view this
7. Everyone is in awe because of the number of zeros. That is all you can think about? Do no techies think tech in India? Imagine if Steve Jobs wrote “blockchain” on a slide. There would be a massacre.

I saw this video of Sushant Singh: https://twitter.com/SindhiChokroVB/status/1274790529318793216

These were my thoughts:

I can see myself in this guy, and there were probably times where I could have been in his place. There is a loneliness among people who understand stuff, but do not have people around them to share it with. The more you know, the more you have to process, the more angst you get filled with.

If I had seen this video before, I would have known we belong to the same tribe. And I am sure hundreds, if not thousands of people have similar approach towards life too. But, as it turns out, not many people like me want to follow a mainstream Bollywood star.

I have to narrow down on stuff because I want to go so wide, and also really deep at places. So I wander on Twitter, Reddit, even YouTube. But his Distribution is completely out of my Venn diagram.

Today, I saw this video because he is dead. That is what it took for him to get enough Distribution to get to me. What heartbreak, and what use!

I think of broadcasting my views out in the space because I know there are others out there. But I do not have a fraction of Distribution that he had. So this blog becomes my cry in an empty space. Hoping one day, before or after my death, someone will stumble on this, and see a man that makes them smile, just like this video made me smile.

PS: He talks about change and rate of change.

Before you know about Bitcoin, understand it, learn about it, Bitcoin is an enigma, a piece of code that has revolutionized the understanding of world for many like me. The more we learn about it, the more we fall for it.

But once you know it, once you buy it, it is a commodity. We do not look at Gold and marvel at its chemical composition. Next generation will treat it as commodity, take decentralization for granted, and make it ubiquitous.

Education is being democratized. I Google or Youtube a concept when I don’t know about it. So do hundreds of millions of others.

As this change occurs, there is a new demand for “explainers” who are not teachers but simplifiers of concepts so that common folk can digest it.

So there is a huge demand for guys like Dhruv Rathee who have started explaining stuff that they have no clue about. They conduct a great literature review, sort through the credible stuff, and release a video that reaches millions.

The problem with such a thing is that nuance is lost. The audience feels they know all about inflation by watching one video. Whereas it takes decades to understand these economics. And half a century to realize how much we, as humanity, still don’t understand much of it.

This, I fear, will end up creating an era of half-ass dumbfucks who will go around thinking they know everything. But they won’t know much about anything.

It is a bad idea to learn about something from a generalist. But the problem on the other end of the spectrum is that specialists tend to get too technical, seem incapable of thinking like a common person, and end up being bad at explainers.

This creates a need for an entirely new category of people in every specialized field. Explainers who are specialists. Someone who understands the nuance but still has the eagerness to simplify.

This gap can be seen in super-specialized fields like crypto, AI, economics, epigenetics, and many others that are at the cutting edge of innovation.

As a society, we’ve learnt to be polite. And then we took it too far to the extent that telling someone they’re wrong has become really rare. When someone is factually wrong, or careless in thinking, we are told to be polite and “sandwich” our feedback so that they do not feel bad. I’ve felt nowadays people don’t even tell each other when they are wrong.

This is logical because when I tell someone they’re wrong, most likely they will have a negative emotion which gets associated with me. Why would I want that unless they are at conflict with my interests in some way.

An unintended consequence of this is lack of stick feedback for doing or saying wrong things. We work on rewards and punishment. We have learnt very well how to reward good behaviour. But, on an interpersonal level, we’ve tried to mellow the punishment as far as possible. On a legal level, punishment is increasing.

When we let the bad behaviour – fallacies of thinking or just plain wrong facts – goes unpunished, we become dumber.

Elephants with an older matriarch have a higher survival rate.

Ok boomer is a collective disregard of the knowledge and experiences of all the previous generations.

We move too fast, lose touch, devalue older generations as stupid, seek solace in a future without foundations.

And history repeats itself.

We are chasing our tail. We need to stop.

One hand we talk about Lindy. On the other hand, we call the ancient civilisations and practices “primitive”. Primitive is derogatory.

Any time we lose all that collective experience, we lose our foundation.

Ponder about:

Lindy <> Ok boomer

Ancient practices <> Modern comfort

Some of my friends are complaining and some of them are geared up or gearing up for the change. The virus, the economy, the business, their boss, the government, there can never be an end to the things that are wrong with the world.

I observed is that some companies are aggressively hiring. Many more are firing their teams. Extrapolating from this, we get a good indication of industries and mindsets that the future belongs to. Watch out for industries that are firing, mindsets of CEOs who are firing, these industries will eventually decline while industries that can cope with the new world and the uncertainties that it entails will thrive, absorbing the newly unemployed over a period of time as they grow.

A simple illustration: crypto companies are hiring across the world. This is a great indicator that the industry has a bright future. Banks, on the other hand, will end up firing people. No large layoffs as of now. But fewer people will go to the bank. More digital. And what will mammoths like State Bank of India (SBI) do with all those who have been handing out cash for decades? SBI has 257,252 people working for them.

The more you think about this, the clearer the future becomes. Crisis always reveals the future. We can choose to see it, or crib about it.