Parasara Sridhar Duggirala's Blog

This book is an accessible summary of some of the interesting studies in the domain of Psychology and Education. Some foundations about the structure and modular components of brain are first explained and then some of the recent research (that are widely popular) in the domain of Psychology and Education, along with some counter intuitive advice is given by the end of the book. As an instructor teaching courses to undergraduate students, I think some of the "research" in Education are mere commonsense observations. I have seen the students fall into the same traps during the course of studying far too often. This book also provides some interesting solutions. I could summarize the book in 50 pages, but it would be very boring and dry and jam packed with information. This book was very easy to read and finding about the studies is somewhat entertaining. The knowledge about the studies helps us contextualize the observations made. As usual, you can always nit-pick the studi...

Whenever a country or a civilization faces a crisis, several intellectuals come out of the woodwork to (a) remind people of why the country or civilization is great, and (b) put it in the context of challenges that other countries and civilizations have faced. When the world was facing the consequences of sub-prime crisis that started in America, Niall took it upon himself to distill the crux of what does it mean to be called the West and why did it do better than other Civilizations. The goal of this book is to act as a warning sign and perform some self aggrandizing praise (if any). There was a sudden interest in the fall of Rome the year after Trump got elected to presidency. I am sure there will be several books on pandemics, vaccines, and economic crisis after this Covid situation. In this case, Niall preaches the modern gospel of "apps" and similar to old testament, he lists 6 virtues West has. They are 1) Competition, 2) Science, 3) Property, 4) Medicine, 5) Consumpti...

Introducing new concepts into public understanding is extremely difficult. A lot of interesting observations about the "middle universe" (phenomenon occurring at a scale that can be observed by humans) have been made already because humans and civilization has been around for millennia. Very rarely does a book introduce an entirely new concept introduced into the public understanding. Even more rare that the concept has been hiding in plain sight all along. Antifragile is one such book. It introduces a fundamentally different way of thinking about systems; from biological, to economic, to educational. It is as if we have discovered a new way to measure a system. The premise of the book is extremely simple and is summarized in the first sentence: "Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire." Design a system that embraces volatility "Be the fire and wish for the wind." If minor variations in environment are harmful, then the system is fragile, if they ...

In the Indian tradition of vada , often called debate, before engaging in a debate, the debater performs an activity called purva paksha  (translated as prior view ). This activity involves inspecting the opponents core principles to such a degree that one of the members of the opponents team would be happy with your summary of  their belief. Steel manning is a recent colloquial term for it. This "book" (more like an extended essay) is a liberal purva paksha of the conservative side. It is something more than that. It also highlights some of the positive aspects of liberal, libertarian, and conservative ideologies. There are several aspects where I found the book to be a drag. I do not think that the moral foundational theory helps at all. Sure, if you bring out a set of traits to be "fundamental", the self described conservatives and liberals would consider a different set of traits to be more fundamental. While this may be useful to partially understand the rea...

The "reality" we live in consists of many worlds. The world of traders, the world of politicians, the world of workers, the world of scientists, etc. Out of these world, I am particularly attracted to the world of mathematicians. For some strange reason, mathematicians seem to have "explanations" for various phenomenon occurring in almost all of the other worlds. These explanations are spoken in a language that is understood among mathematicians, but alas, there are few good translations from the language of mathematicians to the language spoken in other worlds. Having studied computer science and some of it theoretical underpinnings, I am familiar and comfortable with some of the conversations among mathematicians. This book is an attempt at translating some simple aspects of mathematics into the common parlance. As expected, the translation focuses on aspects that are most common in public use. If you really understand this book, you will not fall for some of t...