25 years later, I start blogging

Plants bend when they bear fruit Introduction This is going to be a disappointing post. Let's go. According to Wikipedia: In endurance sports such as cycling and running, hitting the wall or the bonk is a condition of sudden fatigue and loss of energy which is caused by the depletion of glycogen stores in the liver and muscles. I'm referring to a slightly different kind of a wall, but one that impedes development of a skill because of the way we have developed it or just hitting a skill cap achievable using the technique that you've mastered. I've noticed that I'm currently not improving at several of the things that I've been pursuing. This blogpost will hopefully put some of those concerns on paper so I can work on it. The Expert Beginner As explained by Erik Dietrich in his amazing Blogpost, an expert beginner is someone who gets good at doing things in a certain way and is unwilling spend anytime to learn other techniq...

The more you bleed in practice, the less you bleed in war Introduction I've always wondered about learning and what makes things stick. Recently a friend of mine reviewed Make it stick on Goodreads with 5 starts. So I decided to give it a read. This book challenges the existing status quo about education and wants us to change the way we learn. Current methods The current methods include rote memorisation and repetition to perfection. But these don't serve the purpose beyond temporary learning for tests/exams. Students try cramming as much knowledge as possible the before the exam so that they can pass. This goes one step further and children start optimising based on the questions being asked and hence skip certain sections of the syllabus. This method of repeating until one gets it right is observed in plenty of other fields like learning music and playing a sport. This method is highly ineffective and I can vouch for it. The problem with this method is that the pe...

The best way to Predict the Future is to Create it Introduction Newcomb's paradox is a thought experiment created by William Newcomb in 1969. Even 50 years of publishing of the paradox, there is no clear consensus about the solution. After I read this problem was stuck on it for quite a few hours. I read multiple articles and watched several videos to understand it. The Wikipedia article is good but very unintuitive. Please watch this video multiple times if necessary to understand the paradox. The Paradox Statement Imagine that in front of you are two boxes. The first box (Box A) has 1000$ and is visible to you. The second box (Box B) contains either 1,000,000$ or 0$ and you don't know which. The contents of Box B are determined before hand by an intelligent AI with a high degree of accuracy. You have to now choose one of two options , either choose only Box B or choose both boxes . If the intelligent AI thinks that you are going to choose both boxes, th...