Tumse Na Ho Paayega - Utsav Mamoria

Simon Wilson has espoused maintaining a link blog from time to time, and I’ve felt slow pressure suggesting that I should do so for a while now. Mamoria’s piece has motivated me to finally start (and I might backfill, again as Wilson suggests). I’m not sure how exactly I want to do link posts, but this will have to do as a start–such a post can be understood as an endorsement, so I’d first suggest reading the linked post. I think I would then opine on it, offering my thoughts on the piece. I don’t think these will be too long because I tend to read absolutely fantastic writing and cannot add much. Also, my backlog keeps growing so I read more posts than I could reasonably give (semi-coherent, semi-decent) commentary on.

I often feel some sort of vindication when someone smarter than me promulgates a position I hold; often times their words are met with fanfare (rightfully so, because they tend to be so sweet, even in critique) and acclaimed, at least in pertinent social circles. Whenever I see these I usually send them to a few of my friends with a tongue-in-cheek “see this smart (read: random person on the internet with a following) person agrees with me.”

Mamoria’s piece is a prime example of this, of vague cumulonimbus I held manifesting sharply into a well worded piece detailing these abstract ideas I hold oh-so-beautifully. I’ve found myself growing tired of New Yorker style pieces where ideas are shrouded and surrounded by random stories and classic literary devices which are so trite and tiring–Mamoria reminded me why those trappings exist. I’m still not a huge fan, but I think Mamoria does a good job weaving them in and they add some context.

Write for no one but yourself. The act of writing forces you to think clearly.

I love this, and strongly agree with this sentiment–of course, that is coloured by the fact that I have said something similar (not that it is a unique stance or anything) so I feel a sense of ownership over the idea and so am in favor of someone else agreeing with me.

I write mostly for myself. I find that writing helps me elucidate my thoughts and makes me think. More than anything, I enjoy writing, so I will write.
– VSK, Why Blog

Quoting myself feels very awkward, but I’ve already committed to having quotations being implicitly from the author of the piece I’m reading so I have to specify quotes from other sources.

We all need to come down from our peaks. For us to truly learn something, we need to abandon our views about it.

I want to develop intellectual humility, which I think is a very similar idea to getting of the mountain as Mamoria describes it. To do so, one surely needs to take active steps–which I haven’t done enough–but I am firm in my belief that the rewards are great. Information is beautiful, learning things is beautiful, and so I wish to pursue knowledge in some sense as an aesthetic exercise, as a means to appease my palette. Things tend to be prettier the more you know about them.

… how could you possibly find experts and collaborators? When each of us is enmeshed in our fields and sub-fields, how are we to isolate and enmesh ourselves with others?

Academia is somewhat enticing as a means to provide those interactions, as an easy context to establish connections with leading researchers in various fields. I am very grateful to be in university, in part for that reason. I will argue that, for some (if not most, certainly a large contingent of) people at least, you could learn things through various resources–books, videos, QA forums, LLMs, etc. However, the part of uni which is impossible to replicate on your own is the community–I’m lucky to go to a small, undergrad-focused uni with a top-notch stats department. Due to this, I’m able to ask questions and interact with experts in fields I’m interested in, freely. This feeling of community and the abundance of knowledge being propagated through the very air itself is a stark contrast to high school, and is different from what I think industry looks like; the sharing would be couched in a different context, less esoteric perhaps, but losing something in that practical paradigm, maybe.

Anyway, I really liked this piece. I have added Tumse Na Ho Paayega to my vaunted RSS feeds (I am yet to update the website, though) and am looking forward to reading more posts. Maybe I’ll write about some of them to.