Thinking Complete

Note: the material in this essay was largely derived from Burton Stein's   A History of India , Nandan Nilekani's   Imagining India , and various online sources . Most dates and statistics were drawn from the first two (some modern statistics from Nilekani's book may be a little out of date, as it was published in 2008). Feedback and errata greatly appreciated. The more large-scale history I read, the more vital geography seems. The collision of the Indian subcontinent with the rest of Asia many millions of years ago created the Himalayas, blocking India off from substantial interactions with China. For most of its history, India's channels to the rest of the world were roughly the areas corresponding to modern Pakistan and Bangladesh (which, for most of this essay, I will include when talking about "India"). Those channels were formative, but in a skewed way: India has very disproportionately been influenced from the west and, in turn, exerted influence

In a previous post , I talked about some of the biases which skew the evaluations of our memories carried out by our "remembering selves". One domain in which these biases are particularly prevalent is romantic relationships. The most emotionally charged period of a relationship is usually the acrimony which accompanies its demise; the peak-end effect ensures that this negative affect is one of the main things we remember. Then there's duration neglect: our memories discount long periods of uneventful happiness compared with sudden changes. There's also a great deal of cognitive dissonance involved in reflecting on past relationships: we don't want to think that we were the reason a happy relationship failed, so it's easiest to conclude that it probably wasn't happy, and that this unhappiness was the other person's fault! Lastly, there's a comparison effect, where we constantly hold in our minds certain ideals to which past relationships haven&

I've had a fascinating day in Delhi, India. Let me tell you about it. This morning, I went to the Akshardham, a temple complex dedicated to the Hindu sage Swaminarayan. How can I describe it? It's a cross between a mega-church and a theme park. The central attraction is a huge domed temple; I have never seen anything so extravagantly ornate. Every inch of its surface, inside and out, is decorated with carvings. The exterior is girded, at its base, with several layers of engraved animals - each layer must contain over a thousand individual carvings stretching around the whole perimeter. The entire edifice rests on a plinth decorated with hundreds of metre-tall elephants; this is in turn surrounded by a moat containing "water from 151 holy springs and rivers from around India". The complex around it contains perhaps half a dozen more buildings in the same style. One has the biggest screen I've ever seen, used to play a panegyric movie about Swaminarayan's saint

I struggle a lot with motivating myself to be productive. I've tried a bunch of standard strategies, but also a few slightly unusual arguments to try and motivate me. No guarantees that they work, though, and some might actually make you feel more guilty. Sunk costs. Humans are prone to the sunk cost fallacy, where we irrationally take into account costs that we've already incurred when making decisions. For example, when we've already bought a movie ticket, but then find out about something else we'd rather be doing, we may still go to that movie, because we feel that otherwise the ticket has been "wasted". Perhaps we can think the same way about time that we've spent procrastinating. We've already "spent" that time, but it wouldn't have been entirely wasted if it inspires us to do better in the future. So we can use the instinct behind sunk cost fallacies to push ourselves to do productive things even when we don't feel like it,