Just a few thoughts

For a lot of us, our first brush with social media would have been in the world of "Orkut" . A few years later though , it was nowhere to be seen.   The social media cycle of popularity is fairly simple: at first,  there's this relatively cool but new fairly unknown medium.  Then it keeps gaining popularity , till it gets to the point where anyone and everyone joins.  Then it becomes less cool.  Slowly another platform captures the imagination.  The same cycle then repeats.  This cycle can play out quite slowly ( think Facebook) or very fast ( think clubhouse). But it happens all the same. Facebook today for all practical purposes is a slowly dying social media platform. Instagram and Snap has better creds to the cool  quotient now but it too will follow the same path.  But there's also another longer cycle at play.  And that is , we ourselves become less cool :) To put it  more simply,  we just age:). We are no longer the...

 Let's say the probability of something happening ( is X , something partly under your control and partly not ( as are most things in life).  And lets assume for the rest of the post this is something you wish would happen ( you can also assume the reverse, except you replace optimism with pessimism and higher by lower and vice versa in the  paragraphs that follow) Now this X can be a fairly high probability event ( very close to 1), a moderately high probability event ( somewhere in middle of 0.5 and 1), a moderately low probability event ( somewhere in the middle of 0 and 0.5), and a very low probability event ( very close to 0). Now there is another probability in play here: the probability that we perceive of that same something happening- lets call that Y. And that can be very different from X.  Ofcourse we all wish we can predict that Y as close as possible to X.  But in reality we could be overestimating or severely overestimating it, underestimating or s...

  Our conceptions of the world/reality is always through various kinds of "filters". This is as much true of groups of individuals/society etc as it is about how individuals perceive the world . You see this everywhere from finance ( risks that are ignored at certain points in time are given excessive importance at other times and vice versa) to society ( what's accepted as reality or what's accepted as OK/not ok changes dramatically in a decade or two) to everyday life. In other words, the mind has a certain set of basic beliefs at any point of time which we put together to form more complex perceptions. Change one or two of those basic axiomatic beliefs and our perceptions change dramatically. its partly also because in many cases, we cannot know the whole reality so to speak, so we use these filters to form heuristics to form a conception of it. (But even where objectively we can decipher with a bit of effort , we end up using this heuristics) in other words, wha...