What do religion, truth and lies, philosophy, fiction and math, intellectuals, journalism, propaganda, cults, politics and mental health have in common? The humble axiom. And its errant son, the profound insight. All rationality, all reasoning, all the things that a human mind can think– are bounded. That means that they work only within the boundaries …
Author: Varun
The Internet: What I Learned the Hard Way
The ultimate metric for anything on the internet is this: the health and prosperity of the communities you build. That is the point of the internet. It is the only point of the internet. It is the only thing it does better than the real world. Every other metric and buzzword you know is a …
Voting in the Golden Age of Misinformation
“In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.” ― Barbara W. Tuchman We all live in pretty filter bubbles. We read hot takes from the Wire, Scroll, Swarajya and Twitter and feel enlightened, champions of the underdog, lone voices fighting for what is right against the mob and …
Intersectionality as a Method, Not a Madness
A quick piece on how it can meet its potential, instead of its end. EDIT: I should add links and examples I’ve collected. Once I’ve stopped procrastinating. When its most well-known associations are discarded, intersectionality is simply a method for identifying and understanding what happens in the intersection points of distinct categories, attributes or domains. It’s …
We’re Overthinking Health
A Heuristic Approach for the Info-Weary For a TL;DR, scroll down to the bottom of the post. To understand my reasoning, read the article. When it comes to health, it is better to be sane and smart at the cost of not being current, rather than confused and gullible as the cost of being “knowledgeable”. …