Arun2009

I think the first step in overcoming poverty is for all of us to propagate a value system where citizens are held responsible for their countries.

For example, if India is poor and backward, then I am responsible for contributing to its poverty and backwardness, and so are all other Indians.

Possibly related: Impostor Syndrome

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

> But there is a social stigma at play here, my parents never know what to tell friends and family about what their son is doing

LOL, I can totally relate to this! About 6 months ago I walked away from a fairly cushy job to try striking it out on my own. I don't intend to go back into the corporat culture ever again. My parents are too embarrassed to tell others that their scholarship winning, academic hotshot of a son is now "jobless" :-)

A very nice side effect was that the pressure to get married stopped. BTW, can you even imagine what this pressure must be like for the women.

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, you're free at last!

You might enjoy this site then: http://foolsworkshop.com/reviews/

Also, a lot of stuff here: http://www.columbia.edu/~nvg1/Wickelgren/

But what may have influenced my life the most is this book: http://www.amazon.com/Your-Memory-How-Works-Improve/dp/15692...

I for one am convinced that the next frontier is our mind. Information is free - it's your ability to digest it that's the bottleneck. Also, we don't really know a lot about how skills such as creativity, hypothesizing patterns from specific examples, etc. can be systematically learned.

> What leverage does Google have?

Consider that Google owns about 65% of the search market worldwide (http://www.businessinsider.com/bing-who-google-worldwide-sea...). In addition, they enjoy a tremendous amount of goodwill - they are really seen as the good guys by a lot of people.

If Google wants to play tough, they have a lot to work with. At the very least, the Chinese regime would be launching a PR nuke on itself.

> It's not that they can't--it's that they don't have the time in their lives to devote to practicing it.

There is also the fact that most of us don't know how to learn efficiently. For example, how many of us really know the current theories of memory and how we may exploit it to enhance our learning?

IMHO, this is like saying, "I am not really beautiful. It's just that my face and features are symmetric and they just happen to confirm to traditional norms of attractiveness".

A lot of what we take to be talent is "hard" work, except that the work doesn't seem hard to those who love doing what they do. In other words, talent is just a transformed form of obsession with a subject. The more you work with something with the intention of getting better at it, the better you get at it. And the rate of getting better just keeps accelerating until there comes a point where few other humans could hope to catch up with you in your lifetime.

Congrats! About time too!

They're nearly 1/6th of mankind. It's just amazing how such a large number of people can pull themselves out of the most wretched kind of poverty.

Indias and Africas of the world should take note.

I too am reading up on Buddhism, primarily the works of Bhante Henepola Gunaratna.

However, I think it's natural to think about the past and worry about the future. The key IMO is to do these productively, and not go about thinking or worrying just for their own sakes like a broken record.

If you're thinking about the past, think deliberately in order to distill any lesson you hope to learn from it. Write down these points somewhere, ala GTD style. And then put the past aside - you're done with it.

Similarly, worrying about the future can warn us about potential dangers. Worrying should cause us to ask specific questions such as "what's the worst that can happen?", "how am I prepared to face the worst, if it does happen?", "what steps can I take immediately to ensure that the worst does not happen?", etc. Once these are made clear in a list, take the worry entirely off your mind.

Haven't you ever had wordless thoughts?

I often find that wordless thoughts are much more efficient to work with mentally than wordy ones. When you need to communicate, or the thought is intricate or important enough to require a deliberate fleshing out, THEN you write.

Here's an example of a wordless thought: you see a figure that is almost symmetrical and you consider why it isn't exactly symmetrical. It's possible to do this consideration without wording your thought - the reason for asymmetry exists in a wordless form in your mind.

Here's another: you're sitting and you suddenly want to pee. You just get up, go to the bathroom, and pee. The idea of peeing is definitely in your mind when you go to the bathroom - it's rarely explicitly worded out.

Yet another: when you're doing minor re-factoring to your code, much of your thoughts are actually wordless.

I'll appropriate a term from psychology for the process of converting wordless thoughts to wordy ones: focusing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focusing). Wordless thoughts are basically purely experiential in nature. Wordy ones are deliberate, analytical, and well, wordy. Focusing is the process of converting the former to the latter. You hold the wordless thought in your mind's eye and deliberately covert it into a verbal form.

I am of the opinion that much of philosophy is simply converting wordless thoughts to wordy ones - just as artists are experts in drawing what they see, philosophers are experts in focusing.

My yet another hunch is that experts often think wordlessly about matters their field. It's just too inefficient to word out every thought process.

It's a neat idea, but a bit more awareness about grammar would have been nice. I tried, "Mathematics requires hard work" and it gave me, "Mathematics --(requires hard)-> work".

Edit: Ah, I see that items can be grouped together using quotes.

The dude is not nearly as brilliant as he thinks he is. I've seen better.

(Commenting here since the text doesn't seem to appear with the URL)

I am a Hindu (but an atheist). I was reading a bit too much Vedanta recently and thought it might be interesting to give an atheistic twist to the idea of Krishna. People waste a lot of time on Krishna in India - why do they do so? What is the attraction in what is clearly a character in an epic/purana? That was the question I wanted to answer.

It's supposed to be a fun read. I am not scholastic or anything!

Reminded me a little of Diogenes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope).

As Buddha said, suffering ends when our craving for material things ends. We don't have to be as extremely hardcore as the dude above, but following this philosophy in a limited pragmatic manner I think can be very liberating.

I don't think I'll ever understand the psyche of the typical American school-goer. From outside at least and from what we see on films, they seem to be leading quite colorful lives!

My own school-life in India was fairly monochromatic. Being a studious type was actually considered a plus, both by your family and your peers. Entering into anything like a romance was blasphemous and took place only in the movies where they had all the time in the world to run around trees in pairs. The overwhelming mad rush was to ace the board exams, state engineering exams, and the JEE and land myself into a decent university. And get the hell out of India if possible.

I myself have thought quite a bit about the better representation issue.

I once read somewhere that all human concepts are fundamentally associative in nature. If you see the halftone image of an apple, you don't have to work through pixel by pixel to figure out the concept, "apple". The concept apple with its related features naturally occurs to you.

Taking this further to learning, it would seem that we all go through a stage where our knowledge is of a deliberate, serial nature and once a certain degree of habituation is reached, the knowledge gets coded enough to be associative in nature. Consider solving problems in Mathematics - initially, we all have to consciously do a state-space search to figure out the right method to solve the problem. To expert problem solvers, however, the method to solve the problem becomes immediately apparent just from the patterns in the problem. Ditto for chess, etc.

Lets call knowledge that's serial in nature second-order knowledge and the knowledge that's associative, first-order knowledge. I think there's immense promise in investigating whether the transformation from second-order to first-order can be made systematic. I.e., consider learning as a new subject in itself. I am pretty sure that research has been done on this though.

Questions:

- Will the fMRI patterns for the same image be the same for two different people?

- When I think of images, the vision I have in my mind are not as vivid as when I see them directly. Given this, will the fMRI patterns be the same in both cases?

I actually keep a blog to keep track of my fitness related activities - I call it the Nutrex (Nutrition and Exercise) Log.

It may be useful to have an SMS app for heavy mobile users, but it wouldn't be very valuable to me.

Maybe we're just programmed by evolutionary forces to work? Perhaps doing something creative releases endorphins (or something) that causes us to be addicted.

My key takeaway from RDPD was a confidence that getting rich is not as hard as the typical middle class person is often led to believe. His entire attitude towards money is infectious. That alone makes the book worth the read.

Also that fact that it's a very small book, which means the time investment required to read it is very low. I love little books for this reason.

Thanks! It didn't quite strike me that this would be a recurring topic on HN.

This is a topic I'm really interested in, and I do sympathize with your situation. I have no advice for you, but here's my experience.

I hold a Masters in EE (control theory). I have never really found studying Mathematics formidably intimidating, probably because I've been at it for some time now.

But I totally suck at the following things:

- Solving problems that require really inspired "crux" moves. Think IMO level problems, lighter versions of Euler's solution to the Basel problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_problem) etc.

- Coming up with abstractions and new Mathematics. Think (again) Euler's invention of graph theory or Cantor's invention of Set theory.

- Recalling what I've learned just months after their immediate use is over. For example, I had to cover quite a bit of math for my BEng. But if you ask me now about real analysis, PDEs, stochastic processes or fourier transforms, I'd be stumped.

I strongly suspect that this is because we haven't analyzed and understood the problem of learning Mathematics well. To give you an example, 200 years ago people were trying to get fit. But it was not until the invention of systematic strength training with free weights and machines, etc., that we could really do a reasonably good job of it efficiently. Early body builders look like sticks compared to monsters of today.

I am hoping that such a revolution happens in education as well. Before we learn, we must really learn how to learn. Our knowledge of that is very limited now.

See the following for general pointers. They may not be the exact material you want though.

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Craft-Problem-Solving/dp/047113571...

I wish I had access to people who were really good at problem solving when I was in my pre-university days. The intention is not to really become an ace problem solver, but to give the brain a real good workout.

"Tweeting, inverted".

From my knowledge of twitter (have NEVER used it), it allows one person or entity to publish messages for everyone to see.

What if several people want to publish messages TO someone or some entity (like a company), and want them to be seen publicly? You create a channel for that entity on tweet.in and tweet your message into the channel. Others will be free to join in. It'll be like one of those public boards where you can leave messages on particular topics.

So, for example, you'll have messages for the Iranian leaders, condolence messages for MJ, product feedback on Vista, etc.

I wonder if there might be an entrepreneurial opportunity in this. It'll be basically a ping service, but an automated system will ping you - via SMS or email - to see if you're OK. If you're, you respond back saying yes. If you don't, your case gets escalated to human operators who will try real-world approaches to ensure you're OK.

The daily how-are-you emails can even be a bit Eliza-like, simulating a real human on the other end a little.

My last job was quite an eye-opener as far as TDD was concerned. I was a C++ developer in my team who also coded in Java as the need arose. The Java team lead would absolutely INSIST that we write the JUnit tests before coding the actual implementation (no such headache for the C++ side). It was a major pain because the time we should be doing "real work" would be used up for writing tests.

We came to appreciate that however when we got into the maintenance phase of the project. Just running the tests quickly would give us confidence that the nothing we did in the current release had broken whatever was existing. We had a bunch of test-harnesses for each Java module in the system. It was the coolest thing I had seen!

I don't get it. Why does the possibility that you may not wake up be terrifying? If you're dead, you're dead. No less dead than a dead chicken. A peaceful death while you're unconscious is one of the nicer gifts a human can get in life.

That is not to say you have to consciously injure yourself, of course.

Relax man. Chill a little. No one doubts that US universities are the best and that Indian universities and graduates have quite a long way to go (to put it mildly).

Dude, you can start by creating your own new stuff. There's nothing stopping you.