Skip to main content

Featured Post

The Making of a Dumb Datum

Imagine 10,000 years in the future. Two archaeologists are digging a site, and they find the remains of human bones. They take those remains to the lab, perform tests on them, and try to reconstruct the habits and lifestyle of that human. Say those bones belong to me. They are trying to find out my story, how I lived, what I ate, where I traveled, etc. Once they find all the info they need, they toss it into a museum where they store all other such ancient human remains they find. I was essentially one data point to them in trying to understand how humanity evolved over time. Or I can also call myself a “datum”, the singular form of data, literally one piece of information to solve a bigger puzzle. Honestly, I don’t need 10,000 years to become a datum. I am already a part of several datasets people use these days to study many things. So for that objective learner, I am already a datum. Now let me get to how I got the dumb part of it. I have had an interesting and eventful life so far...
Post a Comment

I will watch the sunrise by myself

I’ve always felt lonely. As a kid, I had to create an imaginary world inside my head filled with my two favorite things on planet back then – cricket and movies, to deal with all that loneliness. Over time I learned to talk to people and make friends. So, I became friends with all kinds of people - those who believed in different gods, those from different financial situation than me, those who grew up speaking a language I barely know, and those whose life experiences were from every angle different to mine. Yet what connected me with them were always stories, because I am a sucker for a good story. I love telling everyone who lends me their ear my story, and I love it when they trust me enough in return to tell me their story. It makes me feel validated and normal. It makes me feel like I am not the only soul on a deserted planet wandering aimlessly and wondering when this all ends. But here’s a harsh truth I learn every single time. People change and people move on. And when they move on, they always leave a part of them with me, which adds a heavy load to my frail heart which is already tired of carrying so many emotions and thoughts of mine. Despite that, I still carry it.

But I am now exhausted and I want to know what’s the deal with my loneliness that I am always running away from. I know for sure my loneliness is not due to the absence of people in my life. I have felt alone despite being in the company of a large group of people before. Maybe the real reason I have always felt alone is because I looked inside myself and realized I am not enough. So, I am always trying to find that one person who can fill the puzzle of my heart and make me feel complete. But this is again the kind of bullshit thought that always puts me in middle of a storm of heartbreaks. I think I want a break from it. I want to face this loneliness for next 30 days honestly and see what’s the worse that could happen? After all, loneliness we choose willingly is called solitude. And I am quite familiar with solitude. I have sat by myself with the company of my own thoughts almost every day since I could think. I often bike or run to the lake to watch sunrise by myself. I might not be the perfect person who has an answer to every question of mine, but I think I am alright.

I will try and see if I can transform my loneliness as solitude and learn to accept myself over next 30 days. I will stay away from instagram which is my main source of validation at this point in my life, and avoid any forms of social activities beyond my work and Saturday run with my marathon training group. I will try to write every day a little bit about my solitude, and I will write it here because I know this blog has less visitors than remote places like Mars and Sentinel islands. I don’t expect to dramatically find myself and start living with a new found passion by end of this. But I do expect some pain, tears, self-doubt and all other mildly uncomfortable feelings. I want to try and see if I can make peace with the demon living in my head. So, I wish myself good luck and end this day one of my solitude experiment, which had me spend a ton of time fixing my workstation setup. I now have two monitors I could use to read my rants about loneliness and solitude 2x.     

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is SUTVA for A/B testing?

Imagine if person B’s blood pressure reading depends on whether person A receives the blood pressure medicine in a randomized controlled trial. This will be violating Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA) SUTVA states that the treatment received by an individual should not influence the outcome we see for another individual during the experiment. I know the initial example sounded absurd, so let me try again. Consider LinkedIn A/B testing a new ‘dislike’ reaction for its users, and the gods of fate chose you to be part of the initial treatment group that received this update. Excited after seeing this new update, you use this dislike reaction on my post and send a screenshot to a few of your connections to do the same, who are coincidentally in the control group that did not receive the update. Your connections log in and engage with my posts to use this dislike reaction, but later get disappointed as this new update is not yet available to them. The offices of LinkedIn are tr...
Post a Comment
Read more

Solving Customer Churn with a hammer!

Learning when data should take a back seat and give way to domain knowledge is a valuable skill. Suppose you built a machine learning model on the data of your customers to predict churn risk. Now that you have a risk score for each customer, what do you do next? Do you filter the top n% based on the risk and send them a coupon with a discount in the hopes that it will prevent churn? But what if price is not the factor driving churn in many of these customers? Customers might have been treated poorly by customer service, which drove them away from your company's product.  Or there might have been an indirect competitor's product or service that removes the need for your company's product altogether (this happened to companies like Blockbuster and Kodak in the past!) There could be a myriad of factors, but you get the point! Dashboards and models cannot guide any company's strategic actions directly. If companies try to use them without additional context, more often tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Making of a Dumb Datum

Imagine 10,000 years in the future. Two archaeologists are digging a site, and they find the remains of human bones. They take those remains to the lab, perform tests on them, and try to reconstruct the habits and lifestyle of that human. Say those bones belong to me. They are trying to find out my story, how I lived, what I ate, where I traveled, etc. Once they find all the info they need, they toss it into a museum where they store all other such ancient human remains they find. I was essentially one data point to them in trying to understand how humanity evolved over time. Or I can also call myself a “datum”, the singular form of data, literally one piece of information to solve a bigger puzzle. Honestly, I don’t need 10,000 years to become a datum. I am already a part of several datasets people use these days to study many things. So for that objective learner, I am already a datum. Now let me get to how I got the dumb part of it. I have had an interesting and eventful life so far...
Post a Comment
Read more