Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Salvaging the rest of 2022

 I am a bit late to the new year resolutions, but better late than never.

This morning I had the arbitrary idea that I'm going to salvage the rest of 2022.

Right now I'm working on designing a course that absolutely no one listens to, but then I'm having fun.

I'll keep this place updated. Been my sanctuary since forever.

Saturday, October 15, 2022

Writing without any writing material

 Sounds like your fairly standard piece of writing, right? Recently I was just complaining to someone that stuff you find around yourself is simply so irrelevant and mostly just noise.

Noise. The universe is bursting with it. Our local universe, mostly. Otherwise what you find around is usually relevant to some extent.

Karachi is slightly less hot and something in my subconscious remembers that it is fall season. Fall triggers a sense of change, loss and transition. I remember discussing it with someone exactly three years ago. He diagnosed it as me being very sensitive.

Have I noticed something recently? Maybe that actions and reactions are mostly spent on completely useless things. But what is relevant then? The straightforward answer-whatever aligns best with your interest-is hard to parse and harder to implement.

In addition to these subtle ideas, fall also induces a session of allergy and fever, in which I am reveling these days. My low grade fever doesn't let me do anything useful, but doesn't garner any sympathy for me either. I just get scolded for being a drama queen everywhere, which I simply can't help.

What else? I have realized that all realizations have a cognitive component, as well as an emotional one. You can be aware of something cognitively, but if you do not emotionally pacify yourself, it is not going to affect you the way you want. It is not going to change the relevant set of ideas inside your head.

What is the human brain, but a set of emotionally imprinted ideas?

I have had another realization- I used to marvel at people giving other people emotionally laden advice in service of specific ideas, even though it would be insidious for the poor person under advice. Recently I've realized that it is plain stupid and people give such injurious advice because they don't have skin in the game. 

Our ideas in the real world so rarely get tested that it is nearly impossible to improve through external feedback. One can very easily get overconfident about the validity of one's own convictions.  In a way, it is useful too; having strong convictions drives you forward in life, and there are few substitutes for it. I guess one has to keep a balance.


Friday, October 7, 2022

Noise, baselines and chains of causality

 Noise is everywhere. Literally everywhere, and this is not just a Karachi problem. I mean I can hear the traffic noises all night long in my room but that is not the kind of noise I am talking about.

Recently I have had the chance to glance at the idiot box several times a day. We mostly have 'talk shows' on, but what boggles the mind is that these shows are no talk and almost all noise. You see these suited gents and ladies, in crisp suits and elegant makeup, moving their tongues and rolling their eyes, all in a very sophisticated fashion. However, there is seldom any signal in what comes out of their educated mouths. Most of it is repetitive-there are two or three points of view at any time and they get parroted back at you with rarely a nuance thrown in- and there are always a few debates that are in vogue. Ultimately these debates are so very pointless that even if they were settled, they would not benefit anyone, except for the debators getting hefty paychecks. To top it all, the points of view that are being debated are all equally useless. N sucks almost as much as P, and all these shouting matches are a way to district the viewers from the simple fact that they N is as useless as P. The age and experience of these gentlemen and ladies gives one the illusion that they are on to something, whereas in reality, they are not and they would serve society more by spending their efforts on something else, say, the pursuit of keeping a desi house clean. 

If people could test these people or POVs systematically, they'd see that it is all noise. This is true, unfortunately, for most elements of our culture. A writer? Turning out crap. A journalist? Exclusively turning out crap. A thinker? Either completely uninformed (like yours truly), or dangerously misinformed. I glanced at facebook after a very long time, and the sheer amount of hatred in an intellectual's post blew me away. Mind you, I wouldn't call this guy uneducated. Hatred however is not the topic of the day.

Baselines. Oh yeah, people should be evaluated according to them, and not absolutely. The deviance from baseline shows you what one is truly capable of.

Chains of causality. These need to be unearthed in a calm and rational manner. What impacts what is a superb way of arriving at a model of the world. How it operates and how it doesn't. Of course absolute answers are few in this domain, but it is a powerful tool. In fact this reminds me that I should do a causality chain analysis of my issues, which are quite a few these days.


Thursday, September 22, 2022

The ups and downs of life

 Just that there are no ups and almost no downs so the title is a bit misleading. I was talking to Aby and told her that my reactions and overreactions have almost disappeared and I'm not sure if I am a woman or a sack of flour.

Sure, there is conflict, but it is the low-grade, adultish- work related kind and extremely boring. As for that conflict, I'm not sure I know how to resolve it. Like what exactly is wrong? Absolutely no idea.

Somehow it seems that I'm always looking for the right perspective on things. Obviously it is always horribly missing, although recently I've lost the inclination to use strong words like horribly. What is missing is missing and what is there to be horrified?

Recently I came across a local folk song, and the singer refers to the girl as maa diyay moum battiyay, which is cute as hell.

Was my entire personality described by my overreactions, and now that I have settled down in the calm of middle age, there is nothing left to my personality? I wonder.

The utter banality of most things bores me to tears. However, too much boredom can't probably be a good sign in itself.

With some boyses, you can't do anything right. With others, you can't do anything wrong. I wonder if the same thing is true of workplaces, and one simply needs to find the right one.

My metaphysical issues are at an all-time low these days. I have realized that some questions are worth asking, and others not so much. Of the former, one can only afford to ask a few in a single life span. Fewer can be answered at all and even a smaller subset has the right answer which, if revealed to you, would make any difference at all. Rare is the question that has an answer that is not relative to the speaker. Often, changing one's perspective to the 'supposedly' right one has a far higher psychological cost than staying on the original, 'wrong' one. 

Ultimately we are just trying to build a mental model of the world and I can't claim my high-fidelity one has helped me much in life. For future reference, this is not from my old cynical self, but rather from a mature person who realizes the true value of various things in life. As a side note, I have also realized the importance of wasting time- in style and out of it both. Horror of all horrors, with people!


Tuesday, September 6, 2022

Surviving SAA guys

 Once upon a time, I used to live in an environment full of SAA people. SAA as in slightly above average, particularly when it pertains to intelligence, but also some other essential features like intelligence.  It was not fun.

SAA guys, in particular, are very hard to tolerate. Since I work, I am surrounded by them at most places. There was this cute little place that was an exception, but I outgrew the hardware industry. A friend of mine recently remarked that he can't work in my current area because he can't tolerate wannabes. Sigh.

In the spirit of constant learning and growing and real introspection and overcoming one's fears, I have been thinking of modifying my non-confrontational stance. Recently I worked hard and smart to create an opening for my team in a project, but it seems that I am being phased out. A moderate fight is due. I am too tired of this quiet demeanour-in fact, it isn't even my nature.

Maladaptive nurture. Sigh.

People with slightly above average intelligence are difficult to tolerate for a number of reasons. They lie on a dangerous portion of the Dunning-Kruger effect, and rate themselves much more highly than the reality. They work hard and try to be thorough, but this almost always pertains to the garnishing of BS and rarely the underlying reality. So they will be making a lot of effort, and if you aren't they will be openly shaming you. Judging you as lazy, stupid and incompetent. 

Damn, I just understood a phenomenon. People mention that this country has been ruined more by parhay likhay people than anyone else. Need to write it down somewhere, and can't continue here.

Thursday, September 1, 2022

BS as essential garnishing

 I find it absolutely horrifying that most people who try to teach language to computers aren't very familiar with language themselves. Thus, when you read papers in NLP, you often find yourself trying to tear your hair out. The garnishing of mathematics that is probably necessary for a paper to be accepted is an example of the BS that people always need as garnishing on their stuff.

To be honest, it is my lack of skill at deciphering the meaning behind a differential equation that lead me to this rant, and I should work on improving my skills. But it is clearly a case of physics envy on part of the community. If you can say deletion or replacement, why say gradient? Well, the obvious answer is, contrary to what people claim, BS is an essential component of most human systems.

My BS detector has only gotten better over the years- nothing else has followed this trend- but I am really perplexed by the switching on and off protocols one needs to develop for it, in order to function in normal human society. Recently, I have been thrown in the spotlight in society due to life circumstances in a very personal capacity, where I am scrutinized and analyzed to death. Of course, the analysis follows some pre-conceived notions, so the results are always predictable and horribly wrong. But again, who cares about the error of their estimates? It is much more useful to be consistent and functioning as compared to factually correct.

Oh boy, I haven't triggered people like this since primary school, where I quickly learnt to hide all traces of myself from the public eye. A similar protocol needs to be developed for this age and time, because clearly the bullying never stops.

Back to BS. So yeah, this detector actively hinders my integration into society. It is ringing almost all the time but these signals are only for one's inner self and not for the people at large. And of course it isn't appropriate for every situation, and can be misleading at times. 

So this current cosmopoliton of mine happens to be particularly stingy about WiFi access. This is strange, when you consider that internet here is dirt cheap.

Tying back to the BS point, our constant plagiarizing of western ideas has left us utterly incapable of distinguishing between content and noise, meaning and BS. So this place calls itself NYC and its biggest achievement is restricting wifi access to two hours. This feels incredibly cheap, and unwelcoming. The unwelcoming feeling is a snowflakish one so we'll discard it. Clearly the coffee places of this city need a thorough reviewing. One previously required me to ask for a new voucher every two hours, but clearly that is a better method than just disconnecting the internet altogether.

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Walking out on a dingy, messy room

 My rom was incredibly messy and dirty (let's not shy away from using the right adjectives), so I walked out with my bag. Accessing coffee here means long commute hours and traffic and trash displays but here I am and I suspect the city is growing on me. It has its pros, and it gives one the cosmopolitan vibes for sure. Too bad the cosmopolitan women are almost exclusively occupied with the compatibility of couples around them-of which they are but a poor judge- and as for the men, I have no idea what they do. I mean look at the population of this city and multiply that by 24 hours: surely these people must be doing something with all this time! Except for generating trash and churning out kids, that is. Both can be seen a-plenty everywhich where, meaning no disrespect to either.

My time is whiled away in making sense of my own existence- a labor that does not oft produce results- but I wonder what the sane and the smart do with their time. Makes the mind reel.

As usual, my intention was to bash myself and not people. On my part, I have been trying to make sense of things for some time, but no sense has been made yet. Reading Anna Karenina, however, made me realize a few things. It isn't Tolstoy alone- I have also been watching quite a few movies and shows that revolve around the concept of writing. Last night I had a dream- they seem to be a regular feature of N's presence, even when he is kept at an arm's length- where I was reading an equally thick novel in Urdu that detailed the story of a guy called Saeed. Guy was a feudal and he married a woman for love, but after some years he was going to marry another woman because it was the norm in their families. I was both reading that novel and living the story of the first woman-she was called Zain- and reflecting on the norms of society and how they shape behaviour, all in parallel. 

I have realized that intellectual and emotional circuits are both at play when you sleep. Sometimes I wake up and can feel how the amalgam of emotions has been stirred while I was asleep. I wake up with such distinct emotional states that it is even funny and seems as if my sleeping self has a personality of its own. Something which my awake self severely lacks. It seems that my emotional decisions are made in sleep, where some part of my self decides how to react to important things. The good/bad valence is remarkable, as is the gap.

Z called me up and that completely disrupted my train of thought. He is mostly completely useless, particularly when not on vacation. Sometimes you can discuss ideas with him. 

Back to fiction. I have realized that I really like writing fiction. The idea was partly inspired by a writer I met, A, who encouraged me to write prose. He talked about novel writing in terms of experimenting with characters, who are initially inspired by people one knows and has observed. Of course I inwardly scoffed at his idea, but some time later I attended a society party and the conversation there inspired me to write a surprising page of fiction the next day. I also realized that writing is more fun than absolutely everything else.

Tolstoy seems to have written effortlessly, and that made me realize that the primary requirement for writing is to have lived a life. Life is the palette which one uses to paint one's writings, not dead vocabulary. Not that I don't love vocabulary to death. Of life I have drunk deep indeed- that can't be denied. I was very very selective in my sampling, but my observations are enough for poetry at the moment. For prose one needs to be more social.

Recently I read Ada Jaafri's autobiography and there were a few interesting points. She was indeed a remarkable woman, traditional and insightful. She seemed to me to be an introverted soul, someone who observed life in depth but mostly kept the observations to herself. I could sense her talent and limitations both through her writings. I feel majorly sorry that Parveen Shakir did not leave any serious length of prose. It would have been fun to meet her!

My reading of Ada's life was prompted by reading another compilation of letter by a certain Lady. This Lady has a road in Isb named after her. Her major claim to fame seems to be the alleged fact that she and a Big Poet shared intimacy for a long period. There is a certain kind of female that seems to thrive in our society, but obviously not someone with serious talent. In fact her one line tirade against PS left a bitter taste in my mouth and I turned to Ada's to wash it. I have never been a great fan of PS's writings as a woman, but I am very much familiar with the way our world treats serious women like her. 

As can be gathered, I've become fond of writing once again, but don't know how sustainable it is. These days I seem to have the perfect vantage point for it- stable and insulated- but my time management skills are sub-sub-par, as usual.

Some journal accepted a paper and got ghosted. However, my self-doubt does seem to be settling down, in general, which leaves me with a lot of time at my hands.

Sometime I wonder if a writer is just someone who does not want to do any real work.


Thursday, July 28, 2022

Yet another identity crisis

 I have had a number of identity crises, but this one is the strangest one. Yet the same thing could have been said of every single one o'them. This, however, simply shows how one's superlatives evolve with time.

This one has been triggered partially by me being literally handicapped due to a core weakness and being unable to write tends to leave me frustrated. Writing is not something I would consider a core part of my identity (and no one should, in my opinion), but it provides an outlet for the extravagant ideas that otherwise keep simmering in one's conscious and subconscious. Recently it was advised that writing should follow a strict schedule in one's day; otherwise, simply waiting for the muse to show up is not going to lead to any output.

Output is important. Output matters. If I have learned anything recently, it is this. Not in the sense of showing it off to the world, but simply because it keeps one grounded by forcing one to shape ideas in a tangible and human form. Otherwise they tend to get quite abstract and the entire phenomenon is painful.

Unsaid thoughts and unexpressed feelings- they constitute a curious phenomenon. I'll think about this some other day.

Right now, I have relocated to the most god-forsaken and people populated city in probably the entire world. It is supposed to have great attractions for your average human, which I am unable to perceive through my small little eyes. My nose is being put to good use though- things here often stink. In fact that might be the only thing this city does- stink, stink and stick some more.

There is something to be said for writing technical papers. It forces one to think clearly and write linearly. And to develop a BS detector, although it keeps ringing 24/7 if you are lucky enough to be born in this society.

Society is something that fascinates me, since I have had a few dealings with it recently, what with being dragged all over the north. It was a lot of fun and I should write about it like a human being some time. I had a lovely time with N, except when I was dragged to meet friends and families.

Of friends and families. This, too, requires a post of its own.

I'll be sticking with society for today.