Fixing the Knowledge Society | Episode 24 | Everything is Everything

[@ajinkya851]

Dear Ajay and Amit, big fan. One suggestion - a episode where you both speak about life in general sort of mundane things. I’m still in awe of Ajay Sir’s voice recording to capture exact name of masala chai plant. he thrives on details. best wishes

[@rushabhsagara8766]

What a stimulating talk!! One thing that somehow stood out for me is how in this episode, the camera also captured the listener's face, especially that of Amit when Ajay was speaking. 'Coz one of the great things about the show, beside the eloquent speaking of Ajay, is the unmatchable listening ability of Amit. I strongly feel that's such an important and hard skill to master, and Amit (who will surely accept an award for that 😜) is a treat to watch for that!

[@ushakher5593]

Love the phrase....we are stupid and it takes time to learn....only Ajay Shah can put it so simply

[@Kaustubh56]

Great episode! This reminded me of episode #185 - Fixing Indian Education of The Seen and The Unseen which is one of my most favourite episodes of that podcast. I would like to listen to Ajay talking about the following: 1. "Top 5 Key Economics Ideas/Principles" 2. Thoughts on Behavioural Economics/Finance 3. A general episode on Purpose/Meaning of Life 4. Top 3 reforms in India he would like to make if he is made in-charge of those reform areas 5. A deep dive into his way of learning things - with specific examples, anecdotes and stories

[@BAbhijeet]

@1:01:58 I miss him too.😢 He was one of the best eloquent speakers I have seen. His fealess approach and oratory skills to callout hypocrisy and pedagogical jargon is rare now and much needed today than ever before.His views on radicals are very much relevant today than ever before. I miss those iconic Hitch slaps which would knocked some sense into today's world of extremism and heroworship.

[@muralineel]

The big shift in my lifetime has been from teaching to learning. Teachers taught students about the past. If we think of classrooms as learning ecosystems, we will be relevant to the present and the future. We need to normalise - “I don’t know but I would love to learn with you.” It’s a cultural issue in India that we find it hard to say - I don’t know.

[@Arnavazk]

Wise words indeed. Apply to learning from the inception of life naturally. Need to be heeded from the time 'formal education' begins. Yes, I am talking about schools. Learning is exciting and stimulating. It's everywhere and eternal. Not confined to text books, papers, and four walls.

[@aniketsamant1467]

A couple of years ago I followed a "programming retreat" at the Recurse Center, and it was a really wonderful experience, quite along the lines of what Ajay and Amit briefly touch upon in this episode - of not following credentials, but following a shared appreciation for knowledge; people participated in the retreat for the shared love of learning, in the form of a community. I believe this model of "education" (ironic usage, since Recurse follows the philosophy of unschooling) is going to become more popular over the coming decades, given the access to knowledge we already and that people would seek a community of like-minded learners with whom to share and develop ideas. It probably won't replace traditional university structures, but it would certainly increase in prominence.

[@ajayshah5705]

Yes. It's interesting to think at two levels. First, what's a recipe for the individual, to step out of the treadmill, and actually pursue knowledge? The answers may well be idiosyncratic and involve personal relationships of the nature of master/apprentice, or the old Indian guru/shishya. And second, are there business models and institutional mechanisms through which there can be processes, that get refined, and scale? On all the 3 fronts -- making knowledge, diffusing knowledge, being part of improving the world -- it is not hard to see how the status quo is broken. Equally important is the constructive project of rethinking these things at the personal and firm/institutional level.

[@aniketsamant1467]

@@ajayshah5705 Indeed, I believe that the answer may truly be idiosyncratic to a great extent, especially in a societal setting like India's wherein the choice of profession is primarily driven either by existing familial situations or as a means for a better life, for the most part. Following one's curiosity may very well be the exception than the norm at this point, when thought of at the population-wide level. I suppose that once a society is in a shape (at least on average) whereby people really have the wherewithal to pursue their interests (whether in terms of financial or social capital) -- and institutions are in place to facilitate these -- can we really expect a lot of traction for projects that are truly intended for knowledge-building or curiosity exploration as an end goal. Having said that, I do think projects like Wikipedia, Arduino, FOSS projects like GNU/Linux (among many others) are also quite idiosyncratic in their nature, but the general societal/institutional ecosystem seems to have favoured their development.

[@ajayshah5705]

@@aniketsamant1467 When you choose a way of life, you pay for it with your life.

[@aniketsamant1467]

@@ajayshah5705 Wise words!

[@samrat_n]

Great admirer of this show and both of your work. It'd be amazing to hear you guys someday discuss David Deutsch's ideas and his amazing books - The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity. He covers a lot of the themes that's regularly discussed in this show and especially in this episode - knowledge creation, creativity, free learning, open societies, AI, AGI, free markets, wealth creation, rational optimism.

[@pvijay55]

Great episode! Shah is spot on “Prizes”

[@anoopasranna]

Ajay Shah was at his eloquent best. Great episode!

[@neharane3881]

Hi Amit huge admirer of your work. I have been following your podcast for over a year now and it’s been nothing but enriching. I am not sure if there’s any other way to reach out to you so commenting here, I really think Prof Shiv Visvanathan, sociologist would make a great guest on the podcast.

[@aurvicky]

Ajay Shah, I agree that corporate funded research weighs *value* a lot more but sometimes it can derail the whole academia by sheer marketing buzz (mapreduce).

[@ankurbhatnagar4467]

I am happy that my own views on economics as a subject that is sadly stuck in journal nexus is validated today. But also saddened by the state of affairs What makes me feel helpless is that no one seems to care .

[@SrivatsanVaradharajan-yj1dm]

Great talk. One really wonders how the solution for this can come up from the demand side of the equation though? I think it is true that universities are mostly a "credentials creating mechanism" for most people. In India I can see that this is mainly because right from when you are a kid, learning is thought to you to be a goal directed activity. You understand when you are very young that you should study(What this word means could be very complex in this context but what it doesn`t mean in any real terms is learn). You study to ensure that you get marks in an examination. You should get good marks because only if you get good marks, you will get admission to a university, and you should get into a good university because that is the only way you can have make money and "settle down"( Whatever that means). At the end of the day, you study a subject for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the subject itself. All this short charges the entire concept of actually learning because learning is nice, it is fun and as human beings, we almost have an innate need to learn. I see many people in tech industry ( people outside the universities) who still approach learning always with the question "What will I get by learning this?" and expect the answer to be something like career improvement, monetary improvement etc, For me, the answer to that that should be closer to Satisfaction in the moment because it sated your curiosity.

[@ajayshah5705]

A major site of change should be the recruiting practices of the firms. Hiring good people at low prices is good for the firms!! They should care about it!! At present, firms cut corners on the resourcing for the recruitment process by merely obeying examination marks and famous universities. We each of us will do better in recruiting by putting in work to look at the candidates and not the credentials. This will get us better people at lower prices. The money saved on salaries more than pays for the expenditure in forming a judgement. One of the most harmful things is contracting-out to the HR department or to search firms. This saves the time of the teams that will take in the new people. But the HR department and the search firm know nothing about you, and they will just focus on the MIT / Harvard / IIT / IIM people. And then you are stuck with very high wages, with people who score high on conscientiousness (that's required to get through exams) but are often weak in many other respects.

[@noclickbaitphysics5938]

Hey Amit and Ajay, being a phd student, laying sown some thoughts/queries here. 1. a) Should knowledge be free? b) Is piracy of knowledge such as books and journal papers good? Is piracy of other kinds good? Is stealing from those who have more and giving it to those who have less good? i can see that open knowledge enables more people to join the game, however insignificant a number in academia that maybe that wants to consume that esoteric niche journal paper. But the journal system as it has evolved is a capitalist approach to knowledge generation. For good content you need to pay is something that i assume it is based on. I agree that the system is flawed and maybe the fraction of good content has reduced (time to modify Sturgeon's law) but does that mean the system does not work? 2. Yes I also feel that the academia is broken. Many scientists keep improving material efficiencies but their research never sees the light of the sun that is a product. But I sure hope and believe that they are the middle runners of the relay race. Someone somewhere will cross the finish line. 3. How can we practically improve the education system? How to be a better teacher in the existing education system?

[@ajayshah5705]

On open journals: The researcher has a choice of putting materials out into the open Internet. E.g. see xkdr.org/papers-list

[@muralineel]

The ability to play gracefully with ideas - Oscar Wilde about what happens to students at Oxford. Now students and parents are consumers and educators seem to think that they need to make customers happy. Everyone seems to be populist these days. Like we have too many politicians and not enough statesmen.

[@rohanjaikishen]

Great conversation! Thanks for putting these out week after week. Would be curious to have some interesting 15 year olds on TSATU. It's been referenced as a theme frequently, on how with access to means of production and knowledge consumption has made it so amazing to be a 15 year old today. This, however, is our perspective. Would be eager to hear about it from someone who's actually living in the times as a 15 year old.

[@srikanthn9739]

Am a big big fan, Amit & Ajay. Listen to everything you say, everytime (if possible) ... but this one episode touched my heart since it recalled my experiences with brutal sadistic professors in iit ... Hats off to you guys. Hope you can change some hearts out there in those corridors and main gates of Power. And where do i contribute to your selections?

[@ajayshah5705]

In comments here!

[@nerdlearner0403]

Great podcast 🍻

[@muralineel]

On the topic of prize 2 books - penguin and leviathan, and The social instinct

[@mihirparulekar184]

very unique pod!

[@judhajitsarkar1852]

Please transcribe these talks and publish them

[@ashooshukla]

KZbin generates an automatic transcript. you can copy and compile

[@parthsarthisrivastava649]

Amit, Please come up with the Art of Clear Writing Workshop. You said it maybe out in December. Also, I propose a video on the art and science of writing itself. I'd look forward to bits on - Major epochs in how the expression of the written word evolved over time in different contexts (revolutions, wars, financial booms and busts, sporting milestones etc), the evolution and future of writing in the age of social media and AI, timeless features of some of the best writers that will always remain relevant, and perhaps a commentary on language and form itself (drawing from thinkers like Wittgenstein).

[@amitvarma]

Will do the course in January for sure.

[@BhaskarRac]

Now we have to get our hands on Amit's upcoming books and movies. No excuses like working on podcasts anymore.

[@oflavia2910]

An episode on flying solo vs cohabiting and various living models and their evolving nature pls..

[@ajayshah5705]

Great questions to think about!

[@anirudhacharya4844]

While listening to Chapter 4 The Academic Circlejerk, I was reminded of this story which I had heard long back. A Rabbit's Ph.D. Thesis Scene It's a fine sunny day in the forest, and a rabbit is sitting outside his burrow, tippy-tapping on his typewriter. Along comes a fox, out for a walk. Fox "What are you working on?" Rabbit "My thesis." Fox "Hmmm. What's it about?" Rabbit "Oh, I'm writing about how rabbits eat foxes." (incredulous pause) Fox "That's ridiculous! Any fool knows that rabbits don't eat foxes." Rabbit "Sure they do, and I can prove it. Come with me." They both disappear into the rabbit's burrow. After a few minutes, the rabbit returns, alone, to his typewriter and resumes typing. Soon, a wolf comes along and stops to watch the hardworking rabbit. Wolf "What's that you're writing?" Rabbit "I'm doing a thesis on how rabbits eat wolves." (loud guffaws) Wolf "You don't expect to get such rubbish published, do you?" Rabbit "No problem. Do you want to see why?" The rabbit and the wolf go into the burrow, and again the rabbit returns by himself, after a few minutes, and goes back to typing. Scene: inside the rabbit's burrow. In one corner, there is a pile of fox bones. In another corner, a pile of wolf bones. On the other side of the room, a huge lion is belching and picking his teeth. (The End) Moral It doesn't matter what you choose for a thesis subject. It doesn't matter what you use for data. What does matter is who you have for a thesis advisor.

[@amitvarma]

This is a magnificent story. You have won KZbin -- for today.

[@anirudhacharya4844]

In Chapter 5:Modern Sources of Knowledge, Amit talks about how all knowledge is available to anyone with an internet connection. This is true and it makes me admire the world of opportunities that the Edtech sector has opened for millions of people around the world. This thought further led me to recollect a Twitter thread I had written earlier this year about the state of the Edtech sector in India, I will repost that thread here( since if I post a link, the KZbin spam classification system will likely auto-delete my comment).

[@anirudhacharya4844]

This thread was triggered by a podcast episode that Shruti Rajagopalan had done with Sajith Pai about the Indus Valley Report( look it up, it was published around April 2023). In this interview, in the section “Different Kinds of Startups” there was one type of startup that was missed - startups that are filling in the gap left due to bad policy-making - I mean companies like BYJUs and Physics Wallah which exist because our education system is broken. These companies are considered Ed-Tech but I think the more accurate term would be exam-Tech. When someone says ed-tech the names that come to my mind are companies like Coursera, Udacity, and Udemy. The Indian ed-tech companies are more like exam-tech companies because their main target customer is people preparing for exams, not students or working professionals looking to acquire new knowledge and skills. These exam-tech companies are even opening their own physical spaces in towns well known for being exam factories like Kota, Rajasthan. The fact that such companies are getting much traction and have become unicorns is a red flag that our education system is screwed up. If the education sector gets liberalized then the need for such exam-Tech companies will cease to exist. I once tweeted something that seems relevant here - "India's education woes can be best described as - India does not have an education system, we only have an examination system. We keep hurtling from one exam to the next, from 10th board exams -> JEE/AIEEE -> CAT/GATE/IAS, etc... never pausing to think and reflect" Though Californian Edtech companies look great, the nature of Indian Edtech firms needs to change a lot.

[@cptarun]

Thank you for posting such interesting content for free. It must take a lot of effort from the podcast hosts and the producers. Ajay makes his points well, and some of his comments also resonate with me. However I don't think everything is lost with the university system. Academia needs a course correction, but we don't need to throw the entire system out. I also disagree with him when he says private funding is meritocratic, and it always serves a useful goal. My institute does a lot of work with private industry and is financially better off because of that. Also my predecessors in the institute were one of the first to establish an academia-industry interaction centre in India. However please note the problems that the industry doles out are somewhat run-of-the-mill, and may not always deserve the full-focused attention of a prof in a research university. In certain areas the private industry may not be well developed, and in then government sources must step in to spur research/development etc. Moving on to Amit's comments, he does not seem to know what he is talking, when it comes to academic writing. Good academic writing cannot be abstruse. I was told my advisors to organise well, give context, flush details, avoid jargon, and always simplify. However if the discipline has certain technical terms, one must respect it, and that cannot be diluted. For example standard error cannot be 'normalised standard deviation of the estimate.' The point of writing/publishing is to convey some useful results, and help move the field forward. These were some of the values that I was taught, and I teach my students. I still work at my writing. Amit is getting the wrong ideas from people he is talking to. Certainly the people he is talking to are not publishing in good places, because if you do not write clearly, you will not get past the reviewers.

[@anirudhacharya4844]

When thinking about academia, I often think of the Replication Crisis or the Reproducibility Crisis. The Science streams have this crisis, but I hear the replication crisis is very dire in the Social Sciences. It would be nice to know what Ajay thinks about this. Do we have a replication crisis in our journals? if yes, how bad is the problem, and how to mitigate the crisis? Can a new chapter be added to this episode? Or maybe a new episode?

[@anirudhacharya4844]

Many articles usually contain human user studies or user surveys, how transparent should these studies and the methodology of the survey be? If there is any code and data used in an article should the authors be expected to open source their code and data?

[@ajayshah5705]

1. Every 95% hypothesis test has a wrong rejection of the null with a 5% probability. "Data mining" is the disease where we run pursue the n! possibilities, run 100 tests and focus on the 5 where there was a rejection of the null. This kind of research is guaranteed to uncover rubbish. 2. There is publication bias: The journals favour unusual results. E.g. in finance it's hard to publish market efficiency results. 3. There is the publish-or-perish high powered incentive in academics. So the academic has the incentive to do data mining, have a sense of what the editors and referees will like, and dress up results to look cool and get into the top journals. 4. This combination gives us the crisis of replication. There is research in psychology where, consistently working with WEIRD experimental subjects in lab settings, the replication probability is LOWER for the top journals. This shows the extent to which high powered incentives directly damage research output. 5. With observational data there is a *different* problem : that the world is highly heterogeneous, that the insights into the CRSP data (firms and stock prices in the US) will differ from the insights into the CMIE Prowess data (firm and stock price data in India). Good insights *will* not replicate. There is intellectual imperialism in thinking in a physics way, to think that the world is the same. In fact, each dataset is its own little world. 6. We are pleading for an honest journey of curiosity and presenting findings. Once the top journals and top universities and the nobel prizes are taken out of the picture, we'll actually discover more truth about the world.

[@Mukesh....707]

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom

[@ajayshah5705]

Martin Luther King: we have guided missiles and misguided people.

[@ajayshah5705]

On the decline in new insight in the modern research process -- www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05543-x

[@akhilesh5027]

Badly miss The Hitch.

[@niladri666]

I feel the problems with the system identified is being done comparing it to some utopian world and the "fix" proposed are nonpragmatic, too idealistic and not all helpful for real people functioning, fighting, struggling in the real world. This is a very philosophy-heavy conversation with little to no connection with any realistic course of action that a private person or organization can take in foreseeable future. From primary education to school-system to Grad/PhD/research to everything around have to dramatically change to get us any close to the discussed "fix". Another comment on "rewards" - again, we aspire/inspire driven by recognitions/motivations and prizes do a great job in that context.

[@ajayshah5705]

A. Yes it's hard to take the red pill. B. You don't have to change gears 100%. Even 10% is good. Stop buying the mainstream propaganda. That's a big step forward. C. Amit and I have lived these paths in the knowledge society. It's not just theoretical. We practice what we preach. D. Your life is a bigger thing than your career. Even if you win in the rat race, you're still a rat. E. You may say I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope some day you will join us And the world will live as one.

[@ajayshah5705]

Sourish Das of CMI said : www.dnaindia.com/education/report-meet-indian-genius-who-was-stolen-by-mit-after-she-was-ignored-by-iit-for-admission-due-to-3074074 : a very good young one that did not fit the Indian examination system. Kudos to Chennai Mathematical Institute for taking her in without the ordinarily required credentials!

[@amhejaz89]

Amit Sir, one last time do the sin for us. Teach us poker.

[@PratyushPrkash]

hardwork not harvard ;)

[@abhinavmouli7578]

Today's word of the day: Turgid

[@Mukesh....707]

What about wisdom