Metaphor Man, Tinkerer, Husband of @KeertyDas, Father of two girls #girldad, Digital Hoarder. Vedanta Student.
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Joined December 2008
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An Impotent Man never advertises his impotence.
medium.com/@vikramdas/an-imp…
Vikram Das 🧭 retweeted
Wake up.
Every profession deemed white-collar, the middle class dream, is about to be decimated by AI, at a much faster pace than anticipated, with monstrous social consequences.
Vikram Das 🧭 retweeted
give a man a fish and you feed him for a day
teach a man to Claude Code and you financially ruin him with distracting side projects for the rest of his life
Vikram Das 🧭 retweeted
The problem isn’t that AI is intelligent. It isn’t. The problem is that too many adults (but not all) are at once mechanistic, imitative, unimaginative, stupid, formulaic, influenceable, & gullible, arrogant beyond their skill set, & too expensive to maintain.
Vikram Das 🧭 retweeted
The AI impact won't be felt immediately through layoffs (existing jobs are sticky), but through a collapse in hiring (jobs that don't yet exist have no stickiness).
Vikram Das 🧭 retweeted
There is a phase in life when you experience the thrill of learning things. And then, this second one when you figure out how to unlearn things, discarding beliefs with the same secret pleasure you get peeling scabs, picking your nose or squeezing blisters.
Vikram Das 🧭 retweeted
When you lose your appetite for food you lose your appetite for life.
People on GLP-1 have this absence of gusto in them that makes them poor companions. They are almost as unpleasant to be with as longevity-health optimizers.
Curiosity gives you something to begin. Albert Einstein once described himself as having no special talent, but said he was passionately curious. It pays to build life or careers from curiosities.
Follow the question.
Then another question appears.
Then another. You will get to that place where your curiosity and abilities overlap. That intersection can become a career. But we all know interest alone is not enough. You also need competence. The real world doesn’t reward curiosity alone. You have to become useful. Learn the skill. Practice it. Study people who are better than you. Put knowledge to practice. Do the boring repetitions. Learn from it. Then do them again. The world pays for value. Sometimes that value is obvious. You build apps. You perform surgery. You analyse performance. You write great stories. Or teach. Some people are great sellers. But sometimes the value is less obvious. You make complicated things easier to understand.
You help people make better decisions.
You organise people’s complicated lives.
You make people feel understood. Or connect people with similar interests. You solve problems nobody else wants to solve. Whatever form it takes, competence creates freedom. The better you become at something valuable, the more choices you have. That is one of the secrets of career independence. Skill creates options. Something else to keep in mind. Do work that compounds. Some work disappears the minute you finish it. Others keep paying you. Answering an email has limited compounding value. Learning to write well can compound for decades. There’s more. Building a reputation can compound. So does intellectual property. Building an audience will take you in the future. Investing money well takes care of your future self. Learning how to think can compound too. That brings me to this question.
medium.com/personal-growth/t…
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Vikram Das 🧭 retweeted
Most of what was produced in academia today is noise, some 100% (performative academia), some ~90-99% (science).
Most of what was produced by the baker today is signal.
When you are part of the system you’re trying to observe, it can affect what you observe.
Richard Hopper
medium.com/@richard.hooper45…
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AI does not reward people who hold their beliefs tightly.
AI rewards those who can pivot and adjust on the fly.
medium.com/practice-in-publi…
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Vikram Das 🧭 retweeted
The way to be indifferent to criticism is to begin by being indifferent to praise.
Vikram Das 🧭 retweeted
MOTHER OF ALL ETHICAL RULES
Moral rectitude is when what you think of yourself matters far more than what others think of you, regardless of the domain, regardless of the circumstances, regardless of the benefits at stake.
The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true.
Carl Sagan
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Vikram Das 🧭 retweeted
We had a formula in #RWRI 21 (so far the BEST, on that later):
If you say "assume that" and do not believe in the assumption, do not make the inference. It is the reason interpreting Wolfram that small toy models failed in AI before;
the subsequent success came from removing these abstractions.
Vikram Das 🧭 retweeted
Mistakes are bad; defending them is worse. It's better for you to be the one correcting them than others. Being self-correcting is #antifragile.
A clear conscience is invaluable.
The most impressive thing about @nntaleb is when he starts doing community notes on himself, even if it makes him look bad, when he founds out something he claimed was wrong. Very few people can demonstrate such intellectual integrity. Chapeau!