Shrilaxmi > Recent Status Updates

Pareto principle: 20% of your effort may give you 80% of the benefits. Before jumping into managing tasks, select only those with high priority
and leave the others undone. In other words, you apply the 80/20 principle to sorting out the small minority of tasks you should actually work on.

Hold yourself accountable to the evidence:
1. Clearly define success and failure, so you can't sidestep failure by saying you were trying to accomplish something else
2. Counter confirmation bias by actively trying to prove your intervention wrong
3. Be prepared to abandon or change your intervention. It helps to have a Plan B you’re excited about
4. Get an external review by an impartial, intelligent third party

Epistemic modesty - Questions to consider:
• Who among my peers do I trust as much as myself for this decision?
• Do I not only speak but also act in a way that reflects uncertainty?
• When was the last time I went against my intuition and trusted someone else?

We commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing. When we see an organism, from a fungus to a pine tree, we catch a single moment in it's continual development.

On the capitalist-consumerist ideal:

This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they're asked to do. How, though, do we know that we'll really get paradise in return? We've seen it on television.

"The most important impact of script ... free association and holistic thinking have given way to compartmentalisation and bureaucracy."

I like how the advent of agriculture is about "humans domesticating wheat" but ALSO "wheat domesticating humans"

If you're chasing after an impossible dream, you can't enjoy everyday life. She's right. But if you feel happy chasing the dream, then that's also a type of happiness, isn't it?

'Yes, I wanted to say happiness is never beyond reach. It's not in the distant past, nor on the horizon of the future. It's right in front of me. Like that day's beer, and today's quince tea.'

Over small sips of coffee, they made small talk; conversations that stayed in the moment, words that need not be remembered for a long time.

Animal learning is the wearing smooth of a path in the brain, not the decisions of a rational consciousness.

- Edward Thorndike

Reading makes you deviate from the textbook definition of success because books don't make us go ahead of or above anyone else; they guide us to stand alongside others.

It's like when you're excited about a girl and you see a couple holding hands, and you feel so happy for them. And other times you see the same couple, and they make you so mad. And all you want is to always feel happy for them because you know that if you do, then it means you're happy, too.

We accept the love we think we deserve.

Limiting the freedom of news "just a little bit" is in the same category with the classic example "a little bit pregnant".

He got a better feeling for human life from stories than he had been able to garner from facts; fiction gave him a gestalt of life, one taken for granted by a human; he lives it... He got ideas from 'not-true data' as he called fiction. How to hide a catapult he got from Edgar Allan Poe.

Revolutions... depend on correct organization. Functional organization. How does one design an electric motor? Would you attach a bathtub to it, simply because one was available? No, you would use just those elements necessary to its purpose and make it no longer than needed. So it is with revolution. Never seek to persuade for the pleasure of having another share your views.

Some were bribed, they say. But no escapes; man who takes bribe doesn't necessarily stay bribed.

"Your father is about to ask me the question. This is the most important moment in our lives, and I want to pay attention, note every detail."

Gave me goosebumps. I've wanted to read this story for years.

As always, the roles one plays become recognizable only with greater maturity.

1690 - The Mughal subedar of Sira... sold Bangalore for a sum of 3 lakh rupees to his new ally Chikka Deva Raja Wodeyar

As soon as he bought it, he immediately built another fort around it and a temple (ಕೋಟೆ ಶ್ರೀ ಪ್ರಸನ್ನ ವೆಂಕಟರಮಣ ಸ್ವಾಮಿ ದೇವಸ್ಥಾನ) which is in KR market!!! Gotta visit when I'm back.

Ashes, ashes, and dust, and thirst there is; and pits, pits, pits, and Orcs, thousands of Orcses. Nice hobbits mustn't go to those places.

'Do you know what we need?' Leslie called out to him. Intoxicated as he was with the heavens, he couldn't imagine needing anything on earth. 'We need a place,' she said, 'just for us.'

Compare your own experience of learning algebra with Bertrand Russell’s recollection: I was made to learn by heart: “The square of the sum of two numbers is equal to the sum of their squares increased by twice their product.” I had not the vaguest idea what this meant and when I could not remember the words, my tutor threw the book at my head, which did not stimulate my intellect in any way.

The main problem with school mathematics is that there are no problems. Oh, I know what passes for problems in math classes, these insipid “exercises.” “Here is a type of problem. Here is how to solve it. Yes it will be on the test. Do exercises 1-35 odd for homework.” What a sad way to learn mathematics.

It can be an informative political litmus test to consider whose pain you readily feel (e.g., a fetus versus a homeless person).

... about two thirds of everyday conversation is gossip, with the vast majority of it being negative. As has been said, gossip (with the goal of shaming) is a weapon of the weak against the powerful. It has always been fast and cheap and is infinitely more so now in the era of the Scarlet Internet.

People who heroically refuse to look the other way, who do the right thing even when it carries the ultimate cost—tend to be surprisingly normal. The stars didn't align at their births; doves of peace did not envelop them when they strode. They put their pants on one leg at a time. This should be a huge source of strength for us.

It seems like some conclusions were jumped to, but ok.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't.