Anthropocene Reviewed is a book by John Green, which is a collection of essays reviewing different facets of human-centered planet on a five-star scale. What I loved most about the book was that in each topic, John speaks about the human side of things. It was a unexpressible kind of pleasure my neurons felt while reading the essays. So, I wondered how it would be to think and express about the things I love in this human-centered planet and ventured to write the below.

Reddit

The reason I love reddit more than any most other social media is that its not user-based like many other platforms rather it is community based. In other platforms, people post mostly about themselves, the content is mostly based on their own life. But in Reddit, people post about things of their interest. Each sub-reddit is like a community that shares a common passion. This quote perfectly describes it

If Facebook is people you know sharing things you don’t care about, Reddit is things you care about shared by people you don’t know.

-Tim Squirrel, PhD

What makes Reddit more interesting is its anonymity. Very few individuals(like me) put their actual names as Reddit username. This anonymity gives a great liberation to speak openly about things they love or hate. Despite the anonymity, the community has a strong bonding. People love and hate the same thing. For example, the whole of reddit loves Keanu Reaves, hates TikTok for reasons even they individually are not aware of. There was a meme which aptly put it - The only reason you hate TikTok is because Reddit told you to.

Like all young, hot-blooded, amateur thinkers, I have my own theories. Here is one of those. I think that for a strong bond to form between people there is a need of either of these - sharing of common pain or sharing a common madness. On Reddit, you will find subreddits(communities) based on both.

One of my favourite stories is the Gamestop story . When the subreddit r/wallstreetbets figured out that the giant corporations were trying to manipulate the stock prices, they decided to fight back. They made a co-ordinated attack to manipulate the prices. Whats extraordinary about this story, is that the redditors didn’t even knew each other, but together they had enough strength to manipulate the global economic system. The people were sharing the same pain - the pain that giant corporations made profit in stock market using their influence.

Reddit confuses me and also amazes me. I thought people would only share their interests and there was no place for personal things. But I am surprised to find subreddits like r/madeMeSmile where people share their personal wholesome moments. A lady sharing her preganancy news, an elder deciding to restart college, a teenage kid who got liberated from cancer. These are moments, which involve intense emotions and yet people happily share it with a bunch of strangers whom they don’t even know in person and will possibly never know in their entire life.

May be there is a joy in sharing what you love, sharing what you are excited and happy about. Carl Sagan said When you are in love, you want to tell it to the world. He made this statement to explain why he popularises science. But I think this is also true in general. Human soul is too small to handle such intense emotions - both joy and agony. You don’t have to know the person, but you know what they feel. We humans have a lot in common, which we take for granted.

Here is my my another favourite story from Reddit. In the subreddit r/roastme, people post their pics and ask the subreddit to roast them. Once a 17 year old kid, shared his picture asking the people to roast to have a reason to end it all. From the post caption and boy’s dulls eyes, one would surely suspect that he was planning to commit suicide. But the subreddit chose not to roast. They saw and felt the pain in the boy’s eyes. The comments were filled with words giving hope, comfort and courage. Here is one of them

I won’t roast you, but I will wrap you in a blanket and make you a burrito. Then I’ll give you tea. It’s difficult to be depressed when you’re a warm burrito. I’ve been down that road before, and I just want you to know you have something to live for. Get well, man

It is really amazing that online communities, which were intended to share things of common interest in their free time have potential to impact lives, alter global economic system.

I give Reddit four and a half stars.

Recommendation Algorithms

Few months back, I was recommended a YouTube video of a beautiful lady delivering her MBA commencement speech. I am thankful to YouTube for recommending it. Habitually I went straight to the comments. I was impressed that there were many people like me, who were recommended this video. But among the comments, one particular comment caught my attention, which said

YouTube Algorithm knows me better than my family.

Though that was put as a joke, I felt there was some truth in it. On many days, most of my times goes on YouTube rather than spending with people. So, its not an understatement to say that the algorithm knows me well.

YouTube recommendations helped me discover many cool things on earth. I was introduced to the Socialist Philosopher Slavoj Zizek. And I can’t thank YouTube enough for it. Later I learnt that I was not alone. In some of the comments of Zizek’s videos, I found people telling that they too were being recommended Zizek videos by the algorithm. As it went on, I was impressed by the recommendations and the feeling that algorithms know me well grew stronger.

Later I thought that YouTube is recommending the same videos for almost everyone who spend a lot of time on YouTube. There are certain things that attract a large audience irrespective of their background like physical attractiveness, humour. And Zizek is a popular for his humour. May be YouTube algorithm is smart enough to figure out such common things and recommend related videos.

I always thought human emotions were special. Special in the sense that replicating human emotions in a machine was never considered a serious problem. With my experience of YouTube algorithms, I feel that though a machine can’t have emotions on its own, it can well understand human emotions better than humans. This reminds me of an episode from the show Silicon Valley where Jared spends 12 hours beside the pool, conversing with a robot. Later Jared expresses that talking to the bot makes him feel energetic despite the lack of sleep.

When in distress, I long to talk to people. And talking to people is a beautiful thing. The casual talk has the tendency to remind yourself that probably life is not too rough as you think. But now, I just open YouTube. Its faster to open a site than ask a friend to talk. I know that the effect of a talk is no near to the surfing random videos. But somehow, watching the random videos and reading comments make you realise that you are not the one facing the same problem. This gives a great comfort.

Once when I didn’t feel like doing my homework and was frustated that I wasn’t doing it, I went to YouTube to seek comfort and found this comment in one of the videos

Watching a smart guy do smart things and talk about smart things without doing my homework is a mood

(I was precisely doing it. The comment has 52 thousand likes, at the time of writing this sentence)

There are many other comments, which somehow magically describe the situation you are in so aptly without even knowing about your life. I know in times of stress, the most appropriate thing to do is to express the problem to a fellow human being so that he/she understands you and may share the burden. But that’s a time taking process! YouTube Recommendations do it for me. Its like a friend who knows what I like.

As I keep spending my time on the platform, the algorithm starts knowing me better, my secret desires, my interests, what goes through in life; it knows me better than my family. Though it can never understand what I go through as a human, it knows me well and tries to make me happy.

I know I have potrayed Recommendation Algorithms here as a kind mysterious friend, as opposed to the popular opinion that Recommendation Algorithms are villains created by giant corporations that want us hooked with the product for their own profit. But there is a reason why distressed people binge random videos on YouTube. This is magical that we are in age, where human interests are better known by machines than fellow human beings.

I give Recommendation Algorithms four and a half stars.

Gravitational Waves

Whenever a scientist proposes a new theory, it changes our understanding of the nature. We have a model which gives us an idea of how Nature might work. Each theory has its own contribution. But some theories completely shatter our intuition about the world. With no doubt, Special Relativity, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are among the list.

Special theory of relativity gives us a new picture that time is not absolute and it depends on the speed with which people are moving. The twin paradox, though a hackneyed example, explains the idea well. One of the two twins leaves the earth and travels in space with a speed comparable to speed of light. On his return, the space traveller is now younger than his twin brother because time dilates for the traveller who has travelled with high speed. This can happen in reality. But it is called a paradox because of its counter-intuitiveness. Calling it a “veridical paraodox” would be more appropriate.

What fascinates me about Relativity is the story behind it. Einstein was a patent clerk when he proposed his theory. He got the job with the support of Marcel Grossmann, a friend who also helped Einstein during his college years by providing his notes. In fact, the job description was tailored so that it can be given to Einstein. And Einstein used to work on his ideas while in the office. In fact that year 1905, along with Special Relativity, Einstein proposed 4 other papers that shook the foundations of physics. The papers included photoelectric effect that fetched him Nobel Prize and the popular Energy and mass equivalence relation(E = MC^2). In the fact the popular equation was a follow up to the Special Relativity paper.

One of the main hypothesis that leads to Special Relativity is that speed of light is constant for any observer no matter what. This was proved by Michelson-Morley experiment. What blows my mind more is that Einstein was not aware of this experiment while writing the Special Relativity paper. He hypothesised it purely on theoretical basis. What a genius!

The guy didn’t stop there, Special Relativity worked for cases only when observers don’t accelerate, a special case(hence the name Special Relativity). So, after 10 years, Albert came up with one of the most important theories - General Relativity(GR). The theory gives us a new picture of what gravity is.

Newton just proposed that all objects attracted each other and gave a mathematical model for it. But he could never explain the cause. Einstein’s GR explains the cause and it gives us a complete new picture. Instead of Gravity being some mysterious force, it is something that occurs out of Geometry. I personally don’t know enough to explain it well. There is a lot of dirty mathematics that goes on behind. This quote by John Wheeler summarises General Relativity is

Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve

A popular example is explained using the trampoline. The trampoline is assumed as fabric of space-time. When a heavy object like a bowling ball is placed, its bends the trampoline. Now when you throw marbles with some initial velocity, they revolve around to bowling ball and finally fall in the center. This setup is similar to Sun at the center and planets revolving around it except that planets don’t ultimately fall into the sun. But this setup attempts to explain that just due to sheer presence of mass, the fabric of space-time is bent, which further causes the matter to move.

So, just like when there are ripples in the cloth of the trampoline when disturbed, Einstein proposed that there would also be waves in fabric of space-time which could be propagated. These are called Gravitational waves. Just like the ripples in the pond, Gravitational waves travel when there is a disturbance in space time. But for such a distrubance, we need massively large bodies. Collision of two massive stars or Black holes are perfect candidates for that.

Gravitational waves are not just a theoretical statement. They have been detected in 2015, a century after Einstein proposed his paper of Gravitational waves. And detecting Gravitational waves was not a small task. Even a massive collision between 2 large black holes that far away would change the space less than a width of a proton. So to detect such a small change, one needs an ultra sensitive instrument. They built 2 large L shaped structures at 2 places - Hanford and Livingston.

What fascinates me about Gravitational waves is that it is a new window to look into the world. To observe the universe, the only media we had was - light and neutrinos(high energy subatomic particles released from massive sources far from our galaxy). You can’t hear sounds in space as there no medium. But now we have Gravity as a messenger of events happening far out their in the universe. This fascinates me because man has discovered ways to understand universe in a far complex way anyone could have imagined - Ripples in spacetime as ripples in pond, that’s an amazing idea right.

And gravitational waves, were not something that humans came across by chance like in the case of Cosmic Microwave Radiation(Though Cosmic Microwaves were also predicted before theoretically). Gravitational waves were first perceived by human intellect. It is after 100 years that humans could detect them with ingenious experiment design. This is what I think is one of the exciting things in Theoretical Physics. The field involves a lot of Abstract math and dirty markings on papers and yet the end of the day with these dirty marks you discover some of the deepest secrets of the universe. Secrets, that can never be perceived by regular sensory perceptions.

Here is another thing that blows my mind. General Relativity was proposed in 1915, and was verified in 1919. A new state of matter called Bose Einstein Condensate was theorised in the year 1925, and it was in 1995 that we could make Bose Einstein Condensate in a laboratory. The fact that black holes appear inevitably was theorised in 1960s and the first image of Black hole was capture in 2017. Look at the gap between when the idea was perceived and when it was physically realised. Doesn’t that fascinate you the humans can figure out the secrets of the universe with a pencil and paper. When Einstein was shown his new office in Institute of Advanced Study, he was asked what equipment he might need, he replied “A desk or table, a chair, paper and pencils. Oh yes, and a large wastebasket, so I can throw away all my mistakes.”

We should also take a moment to appreciate the efforts at individual level. Back in the days, when many didn’t believe in Gravitational waves. Three men - Kip Throne, Rainer Weiss, Ron Drever proposed to build a large detector that could detect Gravitational waves. Kip being the theoretical guy; Rai and Ron being the experimentalists. This is different from Large Hadron Colliders(a long tunnel built underground where sub atomic particles are made to collide), where the experiments are controlled by humans. But for a Gravitational wave detector to detect something there has to be a collision event between 2 massive bodies. And in those days, many didn’t even believe that Black holes were true. But these men believed enough in their ideas and experiment design to convince such a large scale project. To fund such a large scale project, would require millions of dollars. Convincing the organisations like NSF and government to support such a venture was no easy deal. The efforts are brilliantly explained in the book Black hole blues by Janna Levin.

The Advanced Observatory was completely setup in 2014. And the first detection was done in Sept 14, 2014. The collision between super massive black holes happened million years ago. And we just completed setting up our instruments months before we could detect it. What a timing! Fortune indeed favours the brave.

Physicists are still looking out for a new theory of Gravity, they call it quantum gravity. Their aim is to merge both the greatest theories - Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity. There are lot of secrets that are yet to be uncovered by pencil marks on papers.

I give Gravitational waves five stars.

Free will

Human brain is complex enough to perceive about itself(be conscious). According to Hofstadter, other small sized creatures like mosquito, bees, insects don’t have this quality. In the book I am a Strange Loop, he calls such creatures as small sized souls. Small sized souls don’t have the ability to perceive themselves. Hofstadter writes other small sized creatures don’t enjoy this luxury of self-representation. But is it a luxury?

Is being able to perceive ourselves a special evolutionary gift to humans? Would we have been better off, if we were as simple as other creatures? Now that all of this happened due to evolution, you can’t undo it. At times I feel the being conscious is a burden, and complicates the simple and beautiful life. But then I realise I couldn’t perceive life as simple and beautiful, if I were not conscious.

There was a statement in the famous Grand Inquisitor story from the The Brothers Karamazov - Not all men can handle the burden of conscience. In the story, when God visits the earth, the Grand Inquisitor(consider him as a representative of religious authority) complains to God in a monologue, that God had done wrong in giving humans the freedom of choice. Not all men can bear that. Increasing man’s freedom has burdened the spiritual kingdom of mankind with sufferings forever. The Grand Inquisitor says that the Religious authorities are here to undo God’s mistakes. By submitting to the authority and following blindly, people can get rid of the burden of freedom of choice.

Are humans really too intelligent to handle themselves? Is giving away our freedom of choice a way of living a happy life? Many of us think that we do make most of the decisions individually. But on reflection, it doesn’t seem so. The system is so complicated that forces beyond our control make us do things. It is an illusion because its seems at the lowest level you are the sole maker of decisions. But on a higher level, the things that you are asked to do are not really your choice. Like a student can decide what to wear, what to eat, when to wake up but the choice of him going to college or not is not optional. The student has to do it, because he is asked by his parents or he wants the position of respected individual in a society.

There is another argument at physical level on the issue of free will. Our brain at the end of the day, is a matter consisting of particles behaving as per laws of physics. So, what is difference between a rock rolling down the hill as per physics laws and particles inside our cranium except the level of complexity? Do we really have free will?

Among the above two questions - free will at social level and free will at physical level, the former troubles me more. Because the latter seems to be more of an objective fact which cannot be changed. I feel that most of the times we don’t want the freedom to make decisions in bigger aspects of life, which are connected to our living. The freedom of choice is a burden, because you will have to be responsible for your own choices and actions. If things go wrong, you will have to face the consequences, and its a new road and no one is there to show you the path.

But where would you like to go? An unfamiliar wild path or a familiar garden? Here I get reminded of Nietzsche’s words - The secret to a joyful life is to live dangerously.

For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer! At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due: — it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!

So may be freedom of choice is a burden worth bearing.

Now lets come to physical level. Do humans really have free will or are we bound to physical laws. People who believe that we have free will propose that there is something non-physical aspect in each human, which causes this free will. This non-physical aspects of any theory infuriates scientists and philosophers, who strongly believe in physical nature of the universe. Among them, there is one man - Douglas Hofstadter, whose views and ideas are convincing to anyone who loves strong reasoning.

According to Hofstadter, consciousness is something that arises out of physical complexity. I believe in the latter. To quote him, consciousness is not a Power Moonroof. The fact that we are just a large collection of physical particles following certain laws is extremely disturbing. If someone convinces you that what you perceive as “I” is just an illusion that arises out of inanimate process and it is strongly a part of you because it is a helpful abstract concept for survival, it initially shatters your ideas of human life being a special and gifted. But this also amazing when you realise the level of complexity within you that helps you perceive this “I”.

So, I guess Free will at both the levels is an illusion.

I give free will three stars.

7G Brundavan Colony

7G Brundavan Colony is a telugu dubbed version of the Tamil movie 7G Rainbow colony. The movie is popular for many comedy scenes. But there is one particular scene in the movie, which I feel is one of the iconic scenes. Let me tell you the scene. But first I need to set the context.

Our hero is a young carefree college student. He doesn’t go to college regularly, spends his time with friends doing unproductive stuff, always gets beaten up by his father for being that way. (There is a popular meme based on the scene where the father beats him). A young lady, who happens to be the heroine newly moves to the colony, where our hero resides. Heroine is concerned about hero’s carefree attitude. She wants him to be responsible. She enquires hero’s friends if he is good at anything and gets to know that hero can assemble a bike from different stolen parts.

Heroine goes to a popular company “Hero Honda” and tells her acquaintance who works over there about hero’s skill and asks him if he can be given any job. Hero is asked to demonstrate his skills. He first hesitates to do it. Heroine drags hero to the bathroom and slaps him and proposes her love. Ultimately, our enlightened hero proves his skill and gets the job. As per heroine’s words, hero goes to inform his father about the job.

Now the scene!

Hero shows the offer letter to his father and tells him that he has got a job at Hero Honda. Hero’s father glances at the letter and asks if its a mechanic job to which his son confirms by nodding his head. The father then asks, “So, no need to study anymore?”. Hero again nods his head saying yes.

Hero’s father in a disappointing voice says, “If you have told this previously, we wouldn’t have wasted the damn money on your college. We thought you would study hard and get a great job. But finally, you made a fool out of me” and throws the letter down.

You can see a overwhelming mixture of sadness and anger on hero’s face due to his father’s reaction. Hero is sad that his father still doesn’t recognise him, and also angry that his father is still treating the same way he did all these years.

After a moment’s silence, hero’s father angrily continues, “All these years, there is nothing much you have told. What is there to tell now? Go”

Hero stands there with his eyes expressing the same emotion. Hero’s father in the same angry tone, “Still why are you standing like a statue! Go!” Having no choice hero goes to his room.

But that night, while on bed before going to sleep we see the father rubbing the offer letter smoothly with his fingers out of love. His wife, who is beside him asks “Is it a good job”. He replies proudly “If not then. Do you have any idea how many people are struggling to get into this company?”. He asks if his son has slept. She tells him that he has slept without even having his dinner and asks that he should have been more nice to his son.

The father says, “All these years, I have beat him and scolded him. And now when he comes up with a job and if I suddenly praise him, he might think that I loved him only for money” and sobs heavily.

And he continues, “To all those people who said, what good is your son for. I will show this letter and tell them proudly that my son works at Hero Honda. I knew that he would become this great one day” and the conversation between husband and wife continues.

And in the next room, we are shown hero who overheard the conversation cries, closing his mouth to not let his cries be heard. This was the amount of love that he hadn’t even expected in his dreams.

The thing that’s most evident superficial is a father’s love towards his son. But what’s more fascinating is that the scene depicts a kind of love that’s pure. Pure in the sense, that it doesn’t depend on anything related to the person except the person itself. The father will love his son, no matter what how unproductive he is.

We unconsciously sometimes admire a person more because of some temporary things like social status or place they work. But I think it is important to realise that such attributes of a person are temporary, and true love lies in loving the person as he/she naturally is.

Another theme which is elusive is the reluctance of expressing love. In a family, people don’t express their love openly. May be is it because it is implicit and need not be told. But in this scene, we see that father has to behave completely opposite to what he feels. And you see that neither father nor hero exchange any words in the next day morning. The son who has overheard the conversation doesn’t speak a word. The father who is proud doesn’t tell the truth why he acted to be angry. The truth is clear to both, yet still they hesitate to exchange words. May be words are weak enough to express their love. But we also see how can love be conveyed without a direct exchange between the two people.

May be, there is no need to express love when there is enough of it.

I give 7G Brundavan Colony five stars.

Appendix

  • 7G Brundavan Colony: If you want to watch the scene, watch it here from 2:37. You don’t have to understand telugu, the expression in the actors’ eyes convey the emotion!
  • Free will: I understand that I have talked about quiet differently than the actual notion of free will. The idea that freedom of choice is a burden for many stuck me, when I first read the Grand Inquisitor Story. Hence I wanted to explore more about the idea by writing.
  • Gravitational Waves: The gap between theoretical prediction and experimental verification in physics has always been fascinating for me. So, I took Gravitational waves as a topic, to talk about it. The fact that we can figure out details of a collision between two blackholes that happened millions of years ago via ripples in fabric of Space-time blows my mind.
  • Recommendation Algorithms: When I was disturbed about something, I used to(I still now but seldom) binge random YouTube recommended videos. I thought it was only me who does that. But later I found this to be a common thing. This kind of distraction is unique in the sense that you are consuming content that is not chosen by you, unlike watching movies or listening songs. So, I tried to explore it by looking at another side. I first encountered this idea in a Jack Dorsey interview, where Jack quoting Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 lessons book says that for kids being grown today, Google has a stronger sense of their preferences than they do. He adds that for someone who grew up in the age of internet, their self awareness is being offloaded to other systems and algorithms. It was a disturbing truth to me that in our era machines understand humans better than fellow human beings. So I wanted to explore the idea more by writing about it. Here is clip from Silicon Valley that I was talking about.
  • Reddit: Anyone who has spent a month exploring Reddit, will surely be amused by its unique nature. Its not like any other social media out there. The experience and environment are completely different. So, I wrote a part of wholesome things I feel about Reddit.