Hello, I hope you’re doing well!
Reiterating what I said in the previous editions of this newsletter, the current intention of this newsletter is twofold:
To provide you, the reader with value by distilling the insights from the things I learned or the content I consumed this week.
To curate a library and a platform where I may have the attention of people who are interested in similar things as me. This also makes me more intentional of what I consume.
That being said, here are the interesting things I came across this week.
Learning Theory
This rabbit hole was prompted by my exams this week and this video I watched.
I realized that some people put in (apparently) much less time and effort into studying yet score the highest grades and understand the material the most deeply.
These differences cannot be accounted for by mere efficiency considerations such as those designated by the 80/20 rule and Deep Work.
The way they parse schemas when they encounter new information is itself different.
I was also interested in how this relates to creativity; structuring information in a novel way would be a natural way to engender creativity.
A lot of sources were mentioned in the video and really, the only concepts that stuck with me were that of cognitive loading and chunking along with the cognitivism and constructivism divide.
However, optimizing learning is something that I’ve been interested in as a meta-skill (Scott H. Young’s Ultralearning is the classic book that I would like to get around to finishing at one point), so this incited my curiosity again.
I wrote a blog post on my observations related to this.
It also made me interested in what different philosophers thought of creativity and understanding. The first part of this paper presents an interesting critique of ‘The creativity of sameness’ under late-stage capitalism; A sort of micro-level prescriptivized innovation that is instantly co-opted into optimizing the system itself.
We want to be creative for the sake of being creative. I see these sort of inefficiencies all around me, and it seems especially relevant in Industry.
Breathing
This video that randomly popped up in my feed made me aware of how harmful my breathing pattern of occasionally breathing from my mouth is.
Though it is quite occult and esoteric at many points which makes it difficult to follow, there was a lot of pragmatic advice to this.
Especially the method of abdominal breathing and the complete yogic breathing flowing in three steps seem immediately important.
A point that especially struck me about this video was where they said we should always aim to take deep relaxed breaths whenever we have free time and become aware of our breathing patterns during the day.
It seems like such a minimal ask but I realized that in the hustle of everyday life, I almost never became aware of the fact that my breathing often became constricted. and narrow
Status Games
In the philosophy club in my college this Friday we talked about status games.
My definition of a status game here is in essence what Naval Ravikant is talking about when he is referring to this word. These are patterns of behavior where we think of society as a zero-sum game when it comes to things like money, power, appearance etc. We try to maximize our marginal standing based on upselling whatever we have (“respectability”) and putting down what others have in direct or subtle ways.
The idea was to try and emulate a sort of Bohmian dialogue where we could suspend societal conditioning and examine thought as a system in general and one of the trajectories we ended up going on was about this.
We tried to look into the reasons behind why we ended up playing status games. After much speculative psychoanalysis, the interesting insight we came to was the following:
Playing the status game optimally is about optimizing relationships.
Optimizing relationships is about both parties providing value so that they perceive it as mutually beneficial and the relationship continues.
Thinking about what you can get from people invariably trickles down into interactions and makes the relationship suboptimal.
Maximizing the status game is hence not about “respectability” at all. It’s about what you can provide to others.
It’s not even the status game anymore, it’s the wealth creation game as Naval would say.