Video The Outlaws

Outlaw: In popular culture, it refers to a rebellious individual who challenges the status quo or lives by their own rules.

In this episode, Ajay & Amit tells us about the lives of many such “outlaws” for e.g. Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Ignaz Semmelweis, Alfred Wegener, Ludwig Boltzmann, Gregor Mendel, Charles Darwin etc.

Ignore the others but definitely do watch the first two sections of the podcast which are about Mary Wollstonecraft & her daughter, Mary Shelley. Wollstonecraft was one of the earliest feminists and wrote extensively about women’s rights, in the 18th century! Mary Shelley, another outlaw, was the first science fiction authors, wrote her first novel “Frankenstein” at the age of 18 !

Ajay & Amit point out that most of the progress happens because of such outlaws only, as they are the ones who are not afraid of thinking out of the box. Each of us need to go out of our comfort zone and listen to the mavericks a bit more, because that’s where the progress will be.

Essay The Four Quadrants of Conformism: In the chapter 5 of the above podcast, Ajay & Amit refers to this great essay of Paul Graham. (I know I keep suggesting Paul Graham’s essays in each of the edition, but then again, that’s how great he is).

Paul proposes a coordinate system with two axes. Horizontal: conventional minded to independent minded. Vertical: Passive to Aggressive. This gives us four quadrants of personality types. There are more passive people than aggressive ones, and more conventional minded than the independent minded ones.

As Ajay & Amit also mentions in the above podcast, most of the progress happens from the work of outlaws/mavericks which are the independent minded people. This is because independent thinkers generates most new ideas, as it requires challenging conventional wisdom. And the biggest threat to progress & new ideas is posed by the aggressive + conventional minded people.

Tweet CMU’s Intro to Databases course: Andy Pavlo announced new semester of CMU’s Introduction to Databases course. Good news is that all the study material is available online free to cost to all. You can find the lecture videos at the youtube playlist. I love Andy Pavlo and I will be watching all the playlist videos for sure. If you are interested in databases, I would recommend you to give this a shot as well.

Reading Updates: I completed reading ‘Shoe Dog’ by Phil Knight last week. Its an account of how Phil Knight started from being a distributor of Japanese shoes (Onitsuka Tigers) in the USA to founding world’s probably most recognizable brands i.e. Nike. FYI, the book only covers Nike’s journey till the time of their IPO.

I have now started reading ‘The Gita for Children’ by Roopa Pai. Currently ~24% into the book. I am liking it so far, but let’s see how it goes.