Category: Opinion
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How Can I Be Useful For You?
I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I haven’t still figured out how to execute this. But here’s the idea. I’m very privileged, purely by the accident of birth. There are millions of people less privileged than me in many ways. I think the right use of my privileges would be to help…
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Why Wikipedia Is Evil
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of many things about Wikipedia. I have a small number of edits on Wikipedia too. But, I think democratizing knowledge creation is more important than Wikipedia. And that’s why the title. I have written with examples about how Wikipedia’s claims about it being “the sum of all human…
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Liberty vs Morality
Liberty and morality can be seen as counter-balancing forces. Liberty applies to individuals. Morality is a social construct. Liberty is about what one can do. Morality is about what one cannot do. Liberty assumes each human is a rational being and respects them for that. Morality is enforced on humans by authority based on arbitrary…
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The Connection Between Curiosity and Knowledge
Last week, 7½ years after Aaron Swartz death, I was thinking about what made Aaron smart. There is this quote: “Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.” Curiosity. It keeps popping up here and there. I was read Anand Philip‘s blog today. The “about” page is…
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Is Feminism Brahmanism?
This post is an analysis on the points made in the transcript of a talk titled “Feminism is Brahmanism” (FiB) and the counter-points raised to it. I know that it is difficult to separate points made by a person from that person themselves. It is difficult to separate generalizations and personal attacks from solid arguments.…
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How Not Having a Computer Science Degree Makes Me a Good Programmer
I didn’t go to an engineering college. Looking back, I’m very glad that I didn’t. If I had gone to an engineering college in India, I would probably have dropped out very quickly. This post is not about how engineering colleges waste 880,350 years of India’s youth every year. But if anyone teaching in an…
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Do You Think All Human Beings Are Equal?
At the end of Srimathi Gopalakrishnan’s post titled “Sexism in Medicine : The Eternal Confusion and The Innocent Mistake” there is a link that goes to areyouafeminist.com *SPOILER ALERT*: Take the test, if you want to. There are only two questions on that site which tests whether you are a feminist. 1. Do you think…
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How Many Genders Are There In Our Languages?
I stumbled on Trans 101 website today. The videos in there are literally the best I have seen in the past few weeks. I’m embedding the first video, but there are 6. Head over to the Trans 101 website for the rest. I learned a lot of things while watching the videos. Reading them all…
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Understanding Socialism
A few days ago one of my colleagues had expressed the idea of decreasing the pay gap between the highest paid employee and the lowest paid employee in our organization. I didn’t give a lot of thought to that at that moment. Yesterday morning YouTube showed me a video of Sunil P Ilayidom in which…
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Good Riddance, WhatsApp!
I took the jump. Deleted my WhatsApp account. Yes, I know. There are too many important groups. There are people who can’t use email or other means of communication. Coordination of so many things will become difficult. What harm is there in keeping the account, and not using it? What if there is an emergency?…