Aravind Padmanabhan

Imagine if India had won their matches against England and Australia - they would have qualified for the semifinals. However, they weren’t good enough overall and might have still crashed out in the semis. The team spent more than three months in Australia for five Tests and a tri-series. The long tour, along with staying away from family for such an extended period, probably led to fatigue and affected India’s performance.

At an event in Bengaluru earlier today, Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah said, "The Information Technology era is now transforming into the Artificial Intelligence era. This has also raised fears of potential job losses. Our government is also working to elevate the Kannada language, heritage, and culture to a global level. As part of this, the government is committed to preparing our language for new challenges to prevent job losses from Artificial Intelligence. I call upon scholars and technical experts to come forward to make Kannada the language of new technology." (File photo)

When patients came to me with logic like this, I used to agree with them and tell them a personal story. I said, I normally keep my pillow on North side of bed. One night I placed pillow on South side. That night an earthquake in Latur killed 40,000. All because of my change of pillow placement. Never kept pillow like that again. No further earthquakes. Can't understand why ppl did not believe me. Same logic.

All the scientific illiteracy that was on display during the pandemic by the "Trust the Science" folks is once again on full display now. Epistemic humility ought to be displayed not just by "tech bros" but by health researchers as well.

To understand why medicine is so complex, let's make a crude simplifying assumption that there are only 100 biomarkers that are important (in reality there are vastly more). Let's also crudely assume each market is allowed only two values. That gives us 2^100 possibilities, which is about 10^30. That is vastly more than humans that ever lived. And this is with the extremely over-simplified model. We face a practical infinity of possibilities. In reality, no two patients are ever really alike. No statistical model can give you very high confidence on how to treat. That is why AI can never treat patients, because human doctors exercise something called "clinical judgment". That judgment is what enables a doctor to tell us "this is not a serious issue, get good sleep" vs "this definitely needs deeper investigation". That judgment is hard. Often they cannot even explain why they arrived at this but great doctors have that intuition. The entire Big Medicine is about systematically dismantling clinical judgment and convert doctors to mere "protocol pushers". Great doctors resist this. Now on top of the measurable biomarkers, there is the unmeasurable factor called "mental state". Every good doctor knows a positive mental state in a patient leads to far better clinical outcomes. That is why good doctors practise compassionate medicine, not just numbers based medicine. I know an outstanding skin doctor in Chennai who prescribed me medicine for my very-itchy Eczema that I had endured for months, and he also told me "try to avoid stress and it may go away, and you may not even need the medicines I prescribed". I consciously reduced my stress level and the problem went away without medicine. That is a truly great doctor. What does it have to do with autism-vaccine connection? As my crude numerical analysis showed, we have the problem of N=1 way too often in medicine and that is even more true for autism where each kid is truly unique, and that is why statistics are mostly useless and clinical judgment is mostly all we have. We cannot have broad sweeping mandates, definitely not broad vaccine mandates. Each doctor has to exercise their judgment with their patient. And they have to listen to the patient concerns first. What Big Medicine is about is to try to reduce medicine to be a pure statistical science and it is not. Conditions like autism do not fit that paradigm at all. That is the battle here. At its core it is not just an autism battle, it is a philosophy of medicine battle. I pledge to keep fighting this fight because I nearly wanted to commit suicide at one one point in my life. Just this morning, a depressed parent approached me for advice and that started my X thread today. I urge intelligent doctors to debate this philosophy of medicine issue. I will not respond to the arrogant "stay in your lane" types.

I have met Professors of Immunology in reputed medical schools in the US who _15 years ago_ had serious reservations on the aggressive vaccine schedule but would tell you it was suicidal for them to speak up. A lot of doctors _in private_ would concur but given how much attack someone like me gets on this topic, they stay silent (I don't care about being attacked, I have been vaccinated (!) against personal attacks on me!). So I speak up also to give a voice to those _doctors_ who prefer to remain silent. We may need an org in India to give support to them so they can come out. Meanwhile do not be misled by "he is not a doctor, he has no right to talk about it". I do have the absolute right and I am a reasonably informed layman. This whole "stay in your lane" is arrogance and credentialism and I do not respect people who use that line. They are unlikely to be any good in their fields.

Long before Europe had its first atheists, ancient India had the Charvakas — bold thinkers who doubted everything. Emerging around 600 BCE, the Charvaka (Lokayata) school was India’s earliest materialist and rationalist philosophy. Attributed to Brihaspati, they rejected the Vedas, karma, rebirth, and any afterlife, insisting that only direct perception (pratyaksha) is a valid source of truth. They believed the body and consciousness end together — no soul survives death. Their saying captured their worldview: “As long as you live, live happily; even borrow to drink ghee.” Pleasure wasn’t sin — it was the only certainty in an uncertain world. Their original Bārhaspatya Sūtras are lost, but echoes survive in critics’ works like Madhavacharya’s Sarva-darśana-saṅgraha (14th century) and Jayanta Bhatta’s Nyāya Manjarī. Charvakas existed centuries before Epicurus (341 BCE) or Democritus (460 BCE), making them pioneers of empirical, secular reasoning. Erased by orthodoxy yet impossible to silence, they remain a reminder that skepticism wasn’t imported into India — it was born here. (Via ChatGPT + random research)

What is life? • Dostoevsky: It’s hell. • Socrates: It’s a test. • Aristotle: It’s the mind. • Nietzsche: It’s power. • Freud: It’s death. • Marx: It’s the idea. • Picasso: It’s art. • Gandhi: It’s love. • Schopenhauer: It’s suffering. • Bertrand Russell: It’s competition. • Steve Jobs: It’s faith. • Einstein: It’s knowledge. • Stephen Hawking: It’s hope. • Kafka: It’s just the beginning.

study maths. not because you want to pass an exam. not because it’s “useful.” but because maths rewires your brain for truth. maths teaches you structure, clarity, precision; and the art of being wrong, beautifully. you stop guessing and start understanding. you stop saying “it works,” and start asking why. every good engineer, physicist, roboticist, or computer scientist; they all drink from the same spring: mathematics. you can’t build reliable systems if you don’t respect logic. you can’t innovate if you don’t understand patterns. and you can’t think deeply if you don’t know how to reason. maths is not numbers. it’s how reality thinks. so study maths; not for grades, but to see the universe the way it really is.