AI is a process to convert solar energy to intelligence

Have you ever stared at a LEGO statue or a painting and felt an inexplicable joy, as if your brain was whispering, “I get it… kind of” ? There’s a hidden magic in this experience, one that bridges LEGO bricks, abstract paintings, and even comic cartoons. And it all comes down to the delightful art of abstraction . At first glance, these mediums might seem completely different. LEGO is rigid, painting flows, and comics are flat snapshots of exaggerated worlds. Yet, they share a remarkable trick: they don’t show you everything. Instead, they invite your mind to fill in the gaps . A grey sunset in a painting? Suddenly, your imagination lights up, coloring it with oranges, pinks, and purples. A LEGO car? You recognize the contours and instantly “see” the wheels, the headlights, the whole vehicle—even if it’s just blocks. Comics work the same way: a few lines, a curve, a speech bubble, and your brain conjures an entire world. Why does this feel so good? The secret lies in neurons and the...

It’s fascinating to view business not just through profit and loss, but through psychology and human nature . Beneath every company’s strategy lies one primal engine: the fear of death . Strip away the spreadsheets and slogans, and you’ll find humans building entire industries to cope with mortality. Two Ways Humans Try to Beat Death Lengthen Life. Fight aging, find cures, stretch the years. Medicine and biotechnology exist largely to buy us time. But we’re carbon-based; no matter how far we push, the clock keeps ticking. Widen Life. If we can’t live forever, we can live more fully — by experiencing multiple versions of life. A survey of late-stage care nurses revealed a universal regret: not traveling more, not living differently. This isn’t just wanderlust; it’s a psychological hack . Experiencing different lives — new cultures, cuisines, rhythms — makes life feel longer. In essence, travel is humanity’s favorite immortality hack . The Economics of Living More Li...

 There’s a timeless piece of advice from Charlie Munger, the legendary investor and lifelong thinker: “The secret to happiness is low expectations.” At first glance, this sounds like a curmudgeonly old man’s pessimistic life hack. But it turns out, neuroscience says Uncle Charlie might have been onto something far deeper — something rooted in our brain chemistry itself. Let’s unpack this with a modern twist. Dopamine vs. Serotonin: The Yin and Yang of Well-Being In our mental operating system, dopamine and serotonin play very different roles. Dopamine is your “future reward” molecule — the fuel for chasing dreams, targets, and trophies. Serotonin , on the other hand, is your “contentment” molecule — the calm confidence that things are okay right now. They’re like two internal fund managers — one investing in risk and excitement , the other in stability and satisfaction . When you raise your expectations sky-high (“I must get that promotion, house, or applause”)...

 Have you ever met a child who seems self-driven , who willingly picks up a book or a math problem instead of turning on a game console? You might think, “Wow, such discipline!” But beneath that impressive willpower lies something deeper — a dopamine loop so rewarding that “hard work” becomes their version of fun. Let’s unpack this fascinating mechanism. The Science of Self-Motivation In classic neuroscience experiments, rats were given a lever to press that stimulated their brain’s reward center — producing dopamine, the feel-good chemical. Some rats became so obsessed with pressing the lever that they ignored food entirely. They weren’t starving for calories — they were starving for dopamine. Now, imagine a similar setup, but in the human mind. A self-driven child doesn’t just do something because they “should.” They’ve wired their brain to release dopamine when engaging in meaningful effort — solving a tough puzzle, finishing a project, or mastering a new skill. What looks...

What do artificial intelligence, Warren Buffett, and poker have in common? They all remind us that success isn’t about luck or short-term outcomes, but about making consistently good decisions in the face of uncertainty. In the 1960s, reinforcement learning — the branch of AI that learns by trial and error — hit a wall. The problem was known as credit assignment . When a system finally achieved a good outcome, it had no idea which earlier actions deserved credit. It’s like celebrating a successful product launch but not knowing whether it was the marketing campaign, the engineering team, or just dumb luck that made it work. Then came a breakthrough: Temporal Difference (TD) Learning. Instead of waiting until the end to hand out rewards, TD learning gives credit along the way — rewarding good decisions as they happen, even before the final result is known. It taught machines to evaluate actions in context, not just outcomes in hindsight. If that philosophy sounds familiar, it’s beca...

 Middle age often sneaks up like an uninvited houseguest—suddenly, you’re Googling “natural ways to boost energy” and wondering why your Spotify playlist hasn’t updated since 2008. But here’s the twist: the so-called “midlife crisis” doesn’t have to be about sports cars, hair dye, or existential dread. It can be reframed as an opportunity for what I call mental gymnastics . Mental Gymnastics as Hormonal Therapy Problem-solving isn’t just about getting through your to-do list; it’s a biochemical cocktail shaker. Tackling tough challenges—whether it’s cracking a business problem, learning a new skill, or planning something ambitious—spikes dopamine and testosterone levels. Think of it as hormone-friendly brain fuel. Just as squats and deadlifts keep your muscles alive and kicking, brain workouts keep you sharp, agile, and surprisingly young at heart. The Feeling of Being Needed Humans are wired for purpose. The sweet spot isn’t just having free time; it’s feeling useful, present,...

 If you zoom out and look at human history not as a string of events but as a great experiment in survival and creativity, one force stands out as the secret driver: optimism. It’s not just a fluffy mindset promoted in self-help books; it’s a biological adaptation, as real and as deeply wired as the dopamine molecule coursing through our brains. In fact, optimism and dopamine are evolutionary partners—they co-evolved as the fuel that pushes us to risk, to innovate, and to redefine what’s possible. Dopamine is often misunderstood as the “happiness chemical.” But in truth, it’s not about happiness at all—it’s about anticipation. It’s the brain’s way of whispering, “Something good might be around the corner, keep going.” Without that spark of forward-looking hope, why would our ancestors leave the safety of their caves, hunt dangerous prey, or plant seeds and wait months for crops to grow? Optimism wasn’t a luxury; it was survival. That link between optimism and risk-taking is what...

 f there’s one thing quantum physics has taught us, it’s that certainty is overrated. At the tiniest scale of reality, nothing is truly deterministic—particles don’t move like billiard balls on predictable paths, they exist in probabilities. And if the building blocks of the universe play dice, why should we expect life, business, or investing to unfold in neat straight lines? This perspective is echoed in the old saying: “Man proposes, Heaven disposes.” We can make the smartest plans, but the outcome is ultimately beyond our control. That means a good result doesn’t always prove we made a good decision, and a bad result doesn’t always prove the opposite. If you judge yourself only by outcomes, you’ll always be at the mercy of randomness. That’s why it’s so important to have an inner scorecard —a way of evaluating your decisions based on process, reasoning, and discipline, not just the final score. Did you define the risks clearly? Did you avoid catastrophic downside? Did you ti...

 We humans love patterns. Our brains are wired to search for order in chaos, to find equations that promise clarity, and to mimic the success of others in hopes of repeating their fortune. But sometimes, this instinct to overfit—to impose tidy rules on messy realities—backfires spectacularly. Welcome to the world of physics envy . Part I: Finance’s Obsession with False Precision In physics, Newton’s laws, Maxwell’s equations, and Einstein’s relativity describe the universe with jaw-dropping accuracy. Predict the orbit of Mars? No problem. Build GPS satellites that account for time dilation? Done. It’s no wonder that economists and financial academics longed for the same kind of elegance. Out came the complex mathematical models: equations that promised to predict market behavior as neatly as physics predicted planetary motion. The problem? Unlike planets, people don’t move in predictable orbits. Markets are made of emotions, herd behavior, politics, greed, and panic. The quest f...

 Why is it that a group of adults chasing a ball around a field can fill stadiums, move billions of dollars, and spark tears of both joy and heartbreak? The answer runs deeper than just “fun” or “entertainment.” Sports are not just games; they are extensions of our evolutionary roots, social classrooms, and symbolic roadmaps for life itself. Let’s unpack this. 1. Sports: Echoes of Our Hunter-Gatherer Ancestors Long before basketball courts and soccer fields, our ancestors survived by running, throwing, chasing, and strategizing. The ability to sprint after prey, coordinate in groups, and outwit predators wasn’t a pastime—it was life or death. Fast-forward thousands of years, and those same instincts remain coded in our DNA. Watching a sprinter explode off the blocks or a quarterback land the perfect throw gives our brain a rush of recognition: Yes, this is what we were built for. Sports are modern-day echoes of the hunt, with whistles replacing war cries and trophies replacing s...

 If you’ve ever looked at your sibling and thought, How did we even come from the same parents? Or watched people in the office form alliances like a middle-school cafeteria, you’ve stumbled on some of the most fascinating puzzles in psychology. Why are humans both predictable and surprising? Why do we love, cheat, cooperate, gossip, and endlessly compare ourselves to others? To answer these questions, I binged five landmark books on human nature — Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene , Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate , plus Judith Rich Harris’ The Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike . Together, they form an epic, brainy Netflix series explaining who we are, why we act the way we do, and why no two people turn out alike. Here’s your crash course. Episode 1: Genes — The Invisible Puppet Masters Richard Dawkins drops the mic with The Selfish Gene : evolution is not about species marching nobly forward, but about genes competing for replication. We are “sur...

 f personality is shaped by invisible systems—relationships, socialization, and status—then studying human development is a bit like trying to map out the wind. You can’t see it directly, but its effects are everywhere. That’s why science leans on blind experiments —double blind, sometimes even triple blind—to separate signal from noise and get us closer to the truth. So, What’s a Blind Experiment Anyway? A blind experiment means the participants don’t know what group they’re in. For example, if kids are given a “new learning tool,” half might get the real deal and half get a placebo (something that looks like the tool but doesn’t actually work). If the children don’t know which they have, their behavior can’t be influenced by expectations alone. A double blind experiment takes it a step further: the researchers themselves also don’t know who has the real tool and who has the placebo—until after the data is collected. Why? Because humans (even scientists!) are masters of subt...

 When people ask what defines personality, we often jump to nature vs. nurture—our genes and our upbringing. But there’s another way to frame it that feels both intuitive and practical: personality is shaped by three mental systems constantly humming in the background—our relationship system , our socialized system , and our status system . Think of them as three engines that together drive how we act, react, and grow in the world. 1. The Relationship System – Our Emotional GPS From infancy, humans are wired to connect. This system is about trust, attachment, and the emotional maps we form in our earliest bonds. It’s the part of you that determines whether you lean in for a hug, hold back your feelings, or instinctively know when a friend is upset before they even say a word. Healthy relationship systems give us resilience and empathy; damaged ones can make intimacy feel risky or complicated. It’s essentially your emotional GPS , guiding how you navigate closeness and distance i...

One of the oldest jokes in science is this: Ice cream sales and shark attacks both go up in the summer. Does that mean ice cream causes sharks to bite? Obviously not. But the fact that we can laugh at this also shows how easily our brains slip into confusing correlation (two things happening together) with causation (one thing directly leading to the other). This mix-up is not just a quirky mental bug; it has serious implications for how we interpret psychology, economics, medicine, and even politics. Let’s unpack why we fall into this trap so often. 1. The Human Brain Craves Certainty Our minds are storytelling machines. Faced with the unknown, uncertainty feels uncomfortable. Instead of admitting “we don’t know yet,” we rush to connect dots. A random pattern becomes a narrative, and voilà—suddenly correlation turns into causation. This tendency is amplified in fields where controlled experiments are difficult or even impossible. Take developmental psychology: isolating a sing...

 When I take a breath—slowly, deliberately—I can feel the openness, precision, and intelligence of the present moment. There’s something exquisite about anchoring attention to the gentle rise and fall of air moving through the body. It’s simple, grounding, and oddly profound. But here’s the surprising twist: modern physics has something to say about this too. Is There Really a "Now"? According to modern physics, the concept of the present gets tricky the moment you expand your perspective. Imagine two stars separated by 1,000 light-years. Because information (including light) takes time to travel, there is no single, shared “now” between them. Your present is not their present. The further apart two points are in space, the less the word “present” makes any universal sense. So, the present isn’t a cosmic constant—it’s a local phenomenon. Why Smaller is Better That’s where mindfulness and physics unexpectedly align. Presence can only make sense if the area of concern is s...

 Investing is often painted as rocket science, full of formulas, graphs, and jargon. But at its heart, it boils down to a few timeless principles. Let’s unpack them in plain, fun, yet professional terms. 1. Price vs. Value: The Eternal Distinction The market flashes prices at us every second. But as Warren Buffett wisely said, price is what you pay; value is what you get. A $5 coffee might be overpriced or a steal depending on what you believe it delivers. Stocks are no different. The ticker shows the price—but the real question is, what is the underlying value? 2. Anchored by Intrinsic Value In the short run, markets can be wild—like a toddler on a sugar rush. But over the long run, prices inevitably gravitate toward intrinsic value. That’s the anchor. The challenge? Intrinsic value isn’t printed on a stock chart. You have to estimate it. 3. What Is Intrinsic Value Anyway? Think of intrinsic value as the present value of all the cash a company will generate over its lifetim...

 When it comes to reading, quantity alone won’t take you far. What truly matters is how and what you read. Don’t limit yourself to a single perspective. A well-rounded mind thrives on exploring different viewpoints , especially those that challenge your assumptions. The best books are not the ones that simply echo today’s buzzwords or political correctness—they’re the ones that stand the test of time , weathering decades (or even centuries) of scrutiny while still offering wisdom. In today’s world, it’s easy to consume ideas that sound good on paper but fall apart in real life. That’s why scientific thinking matters so much. You need the habit of constantly testing hypotheses, not just accepting them at face value. The courage to try, probe, and even disprove is what keeps your mind sharp and adaptable. Ultimately, independent thinking and critical reasoning are far more valuable than passively devouring a mountain of books. Reading widely is important, but thinking deeply ...

 We humans love certainty. We want straight answers, clean forecasts, and guarantees. But here’s the twist: the universe—especially life itself—doesn’t run on certainties. It runs on probabilities. Take the most fundamental miracle we know: the creation of a new human life. The combination of genes from a man and a woman is not a deterministic equation with one guaranteed outcome. It’s a roll of the dice—an immensely sophisticated, beautifully probabilistic process. That probabilistic design isn’t an accident. It’s a feature. Why? Because diversity is survival’s superpower. If genes were deterministic, every child would be a carbon copy of their parents. That might work fine in a stable, unchanging world—but ours isn’t like that. By mixing probabilities into the process, evolution ensures variation: different traits, different strengths, different ways of adapting to whatever curveballs the environment throws our way. Diversity is insurance. It boosts the odds that someo...

 Ever feel like the modern world is moving faster than you can process? That’s not just your inbox talking—it’s evolution lagging behind. Human beings are wired by millions of years of genetic evolution. Our instincts, cravings, fears, and social behaviors were honed for survival in small tribes hunting berries and antelopes. But here’s the catch: while genes evolve slowly, technology and society evolve at breakneck speed. It’s like trying to run Windows 95 on a quantum computer—we’re just not built for the environment we’ve created. Think about it: Sugar cravings. Our genes push us to hoard calories as if famine is always around the corner. Enter artificial sweeteners, high-fructose corn syrup, and supermarket aisles that never go empty. The result? Obesity and metabolic diseases our ancestors never faced. Social instincts. We evolved to connect with a tight-knit group of maybe 150 people (hello, Dunbar’s number). Now, the internet drops us into global group chats with m...

 Large Language Models (LLMs) feel magical at times. Ask them to draft an email, summarize a research paper, or debug a tricky piece of code, and they’ll respond instantly with something that looks polished and intelligent. No wonder some people call them “digital gods.” But let’s be clear: LLMs aren’t omniscient beings. They’re probability engines. What They Really Do At their core, LLMs are sequencing machines. They don’t “think” like humans, nor do they discover scientific truths from scratch. Instead, they predict the most likely next word given everything they’ve seen before. With enough training data, that prediction process produces fluent, insightful, and sometimes even creative results. It’s a bit like autocomplete on steroids: far more powerful, but built on the same foundation — statistical pattern recognition. What They’re Not Because of that, it’s misleading to cast LLMs as digital gods. They haven’t invented a new physics theory, engineered a new vaccine, or so...

 When ChatGPT first burst onto the scene, many believed prompt engineering would be the next hot career. Clever users discovered that with the right phrasing — “act as an expert,” “follow these steps,” “use bullet points” — you could coax the model into giving sharper answers. Entire guides of “prompt recipes” emerged, promising to unlock hidden capabilities. But today, with the release of the latest models, that buzz is fading. Why? Because modern LLMs are getting smarter at understanding intent — thanks to reinforcement learning. Why Prompts Worked in the First Place Early LLMs were like gifted but undisciplined students: full of knowledge but prone to wandering off-topic. Prompt engineering acted as a steering wheel. If you wanted a better summary, you didn’t just say “summarize this” ; you gave an example summary, specified length, or even added “in the style of The Economist.” Those carefully crafted instructions worked because the model was essentially a probability eng...

  From Cats to Code: The Old AI Playbook Before 2015, AI progress was simple: more task-specific data → better task performance . If you wanted a model to spot cats, you just fed it millions of cat photos. The model got better because its entire world was defined by cats — nothing else mattered. LLMs Don’t Play by Those Rules Large language models (LLMs) flip this script. Say you want to boost an LLM’s debugging ability. Your first instinct might be: “Just give it endless debugging logs.” But unlike cat classifiers, LLMs don’t learn skills by marinating in one type of data. Debugging isn’t only about debugging cases — it’s about understanding programming languages, human intent, problem-solving strategies, and even natural-language explanations. The Theory: Breadth Beats Narrowness Here’s why: Old Models = Narrow Lens Classic models captured patterns within a tight distribution. More data from the same distribution (cats, voices, digits) always helped. LLMs = Broad Wor...