advice_for_you/controversial_india.html

2025-06-14

To do for self

Shorten this document. Many of the core ideas here are repetitive and can be expressed more concisely.
Consider using more "show not tell" and "exposure". This document seems atleast partly written to my future self, not to persuade others.

Controversial topics (India)

If you are not from India, this post is likely less valuable to you than some of my other posts.

Please consider first reading the page on Disclaimer on value differences.

Summary

free speech
- As per my values, the following world is better than current world: All places on Earth support free speech.
- Some topics are considered sensitive in India and my socioeconomic class. All my opinions on these topics are in this post.
- I am not trying to start a social movement on any of these topics. I am pragmatic about how much risk I would like to expose myself to with respect to listed topics, as using my website to spread my values is not my top priority in life.
politics
- As per my values, the following world is better than current world: India has a strong rule of law. I morally support people who protect safety of people whose values/beliefs they disagree with.
- As per my values, the following world is better than current world: India passes a law protecting right to bear arms. I morally support people who arm themselves even in the absence of such a law.
- I have low trust in Indian political authorities across all branches of govt. I avoid publicly supporting any political party in India.
individual
- I am highly individualist. I do not let anyone else control important decisions in my life, and am willing to go to extreme lengths to protect this freedom.
- I am deliberate about what I am learning from whom and why. I don't copy-paste values/beliefs of my friends and family.
- I am highly cosmpolitan.
religion
- I am atheist. I wish more people were atheist like me, but I can peacefully coexist with religious people.
economic
- I am weakly optimistic on Indian economic growth.
- I think Indian culture has been historically too sympathetic to economically left-leaning ideology and this is directly responsible for the vast majority of suffering in India today.

A world that is "better" is still not optimal. I don't see democracy or free markets or nationalism or liberalism or any other existing ideology or political institution as the optimal ideology or institution for all of humanity until the end of time. There may exist even better worlds that require very different political systems from the ones suggested here.

Main

Freedom of speech in India

I live in India, upper-middle socioeconomic class (college-educated, net worth $20k-$100k). This might place certain restrictions on what I can say and how I say it.

Some topics that are considered sensitive:

Major reason: I've made some promises of privacy to some people (either explicitly or implicitly)
- criticism of people in my immediate social circle
Major reason: I'd like to stay safe physically.
- criticism of any religion or religious leaders, including related issues like dating, caste, etc.
- criticism of any political party or politicians in India
- criticism of India
???

All my opinions on these topics are within this one post, and I will avoid mentioning them in other posts.

I generally support freedom of speech as a cultural norm and a legally protected right.

(I might use pseudonyms to talk about these topics anonymously. I understand that someone putting enough effort can probaly doxx them anyway.)

No movement pls

Social change happens not when 10% of people want change, but when 10% of people know that everyone in that 10% wants change. Establishing "common knowledge" is a major part of it. See also: Blue Eyes Puzzle, Scott Alexander's political posts, Srdja Popovick's book

I am NOT interested in acting as a leader for social change around any topic mentioned on this page.

Goals of this website:

Find high quality research collaborators, receive high quality feedback
Spread knowledge

NOT Goals of this website:

Establish "common knowledge", start a political movement

Rule of law in India

Protecting your safety, belongings and relationships requires living in a culture that allows you to protect these things. Law enforcers are usually members of your culture and ultimately accountable to members of your culture. It is not practical for law enforcement to protect you if most members of your culture don't feel you deserve to be protected.

Physical safety is the second level of Maslow's hierarchy, after having enough food and water. In today's world (and particularly in India), it is rare to find someone dying of thirst or starvation. But it is not rare to find someone who feels unsafe.

Fear begets fear. If you are afraid of people of a different value system from yours, you're less likely to advocate for rule of law to protect them. They will then use extra-legal means to protect themselves. Now both you and them are less safe.

People who feel less safe can be less empathetic, less honest, less trusting and more isolationist. If many people collectively feel unsafe, this has impacts on nearly every aspect of culture. These damaging effects can persist multiple generations, as it is transmitted from parents to children.

In particular, if you are benefitting in any way from making others feel less safe, please consider whether your benefits are worth inflicting this sort of damage on another person. The damage can persist long after you die, the benefits may not.

Please consider protecting people in your daily life from harm irrespective of their value system. Please consider advocating for a rule of law that protects everyone. This way everyone can peacefully coexist despite their differences.

Right to bear arms in India

I support passing a law that gives all citizens the right to own guns, with no exceptions.

In the absence of such a law, I am generally sympathetic to individuals and groups that illegally arm themselves for defensive purposes.

I support both majority and minority groups that arm themselves. I believe the truth about any matter is more likely to come out when opinions besides the consensus opinion can also be expressed, and this requires protection of the safety of those who express such opinions. I think guns inherently favour defence, as they increase the cost (both financial and moral) a majority group needs to pay to suppress the opinion of a minority group.

Trust in authority in India

I generally have low trust in authority, atleast within a representative democratic setup such as that in India.

I think many Indians are not surprised when leaders of the executive branch or any political party prioritise their self-interest above what's good for citizens.

However Indian military chiefs-of-staff and leaders of indian intelligence (RAW, IB) enjoy a huge amount of trust from the Indian public which might be undeserved.

Often political groups in India use their own private militias to perpetuate communal riots. It is common for the IB to avoid actively entering such conflicts, allowing existing groups to succeed at their goals. RAW and IB are run by IPS officers. Indian bureaucrats in general face an incentive structure that trains them during their lifetime to be risk-averse with their career.

Similiarly, I think Indian public on average has a fairly high trust level in Supreme Court judges and heads of Election Commission, and I have a lower level of trust in them.

Indian politics

I mostly avoid publicly supporting any political party in India

I am supportive of the many long-term structural and cultural changes to Indian politics proposed in this document. I think implementing will lead to bigger changes in outcomes than overturning the result of any one election from BJP to Congress or vice versa.
There may be safety risks to discussing Indian politics online.
- Discussing or influencing Indian politics is not my number one life priority. So I am more pragmatic about what risks I am willing or unwilling to undertake. If it were my number one priority I'd probably be finding a way to bypass the safety risks.
- I don't think India on its current trajectory is likely to be an important player globally. (See the section on economic growth for more.) This partly informs my reasoning for why involving myself in Indian politics is not my top priority.

Individualism

I am quite individualist. I take my life decisions myself, and I want to ensure I'm the primary person responsible for the outcomes of my life. IMO some people, but not necessarily all people, could benefit from being more individualist. How you want to live your life is a personal decision. I am not recommending everyone copy me.

I am aware that belonging to upper-middle class is a significant causal factor in this choice of mine. I am not significantly financially dependent on anyone, no one is significantly financially dependent on me, and bad choices taken by any one person in my social circle (including me) don't significantly financially affect other people in the circle.

Why?

Some important ideas that I believe in are as follows.

Almost nobody likes being controlled by another person.

This could be a parent or sibling or spouse or employer or political leader or anyone else. Voluntarily following someone almost always feels better than following them under threat of violence or starvation.
Ideally you can negotiate boundaries and agreements with people in your current social circle in a mutually beneficial way, be it when deciding your actions or when expanding or narrowing your circle.
I'm strongly in favour of consensual social connections over non-consensual ones.
I'm also generally in favour of making long-term commitments not only short-term ones. Consensual agreements doesn't necessarily mean no commitments or responabilities.
However, sometimes people in your existing social circle might restrict you and seek control over you. If you are currently under someone else's control, and you would prefer to break out for any reason, this might be possible. See below for how.

There are 8 billion people on this planet. The probability that your family and friends are among the wisest / most knowledgible / happiest / kindest / etc people out of these 8 billion is approximately zero.

You can still selectively learn good things from your family and friends, but it'll help to also consider learning from others.
You can increase the odds you have an awesome life by deliberately choosing what you learn and from whom. Your source of inspiration and learning could be a podcaster or religious leader or politician or filmstar or anyone really.
- Copying other people's decisions tends to get you life outcomes similar to those you're copying. Make sure to track what outcomes your role models got in their own life.
If you are not satisfied with your role models' life outcomes and want something better (or even just different) for your life, you must learn to think independently and act independently.
- Becoming an independent thinker starts with exposing yourself to books, people and situations that others in your social circle are not being exposed to. Your brain is a computer, its output depends on its input.
- I have gained a tremendous amount of value in my life doing this, arguably more than my entire formal education (although it's kinda hard to compare, they both support each other).

Approval / disapproval of you by your social circle is one of the largest predictors of your behaviour.

Social incentives (what your friends and family approve of and disapprove of) are often a stronger predictor of your behaviour than financial incentives (what makes you more money) or culture (what other people around you usually do).
If you choose your social circle deliberately, you can alter your own thinking and behaviour.
Pain of social disapproval is often greater than reward of social approval, atleast in terms of how it feels inside your head. You should be especially careful about what your peers disapprove of, as this will affect you more strongly.
See also: Asch's conformity tests and other research that confirms these hypotheses in a specific lab setting

Cosmopolitanism

I am extremely cosmopolitan.

If this at all interests you, I recommend making friends (or atleast acquaintances) of people from countries other than your native one. I would also recommend making friends with people of different cultures in your country, of different socioeconomic classes, and of different value systems.

How?

This could be online or by travelling to other places or by finding people from those places visiting or living in your city.

Why?

Friends can tell you things you won't learn as easily from social media or elite-funded news channels (i.e. almost all news channels).
Also you'll be able to empathise with actual people rather than figments of your imagination. I've personally had good experiences doing this.
The really optimistic version of this is, maybe wars will become less likely if everyone had friends from other countries, maybe class boundaries would reduce and so on. But I think the benefits to you as an individual alone are worth it, ignoring the societal benefits.

Religion

I am atheist. I strive to be tolerant of people of other faiths, although there are some topics we may have to avoid in casual conversations in order to have a pleasant interaction. I wish more people in this world were atheist like I am, but converting people to atheism is not the primary goal of my life. I can probably peacefully coexist with you if you are religious.

Which religion you choose to belong to is one of the most important decisions of your life. You don't want to blindly pick whichever religion you happened to be born into. It is better to think deliberately about it.

How?

If you are interested in exploring further on this topic, there are lots of freely available websites, books and videos online. Consider reading the writings of all the major world religions, and reading materials from multiple conflicting points of view.
I'm not sure what the best intro resource on atheism is, maybe this one?.

The rest of this section elaborates my personal views on religion. If you're not interested, you are free to ignore it.

There's a bunch of separate threads of evidence in favour of atheism that I consider worth studying. Which ones you study more deeply may depend on your interests. The most important thing is you actually study these topics yourself from the ground up, so you aren't blindly trusting a bunch of scientists or scientific institutions.

Stuff I've studied reasonably well:

biochemistry, genomics, computational genomics (example)
newton's laws, quantum mechanics, newton's laws implying deterministic universe, philosophical implications of human brains also being deterministic
occam's razor, solomonoff induction
chalmer's hard problem of consciousness

Stuff I've studied at surface level:

radioactive carbon dating of fossils
particle physics, esp. particle physics around big bang, star formation
evolutionary explanations for mammalian morality
redshift of stars due to universe expansion
psychology, evopsych, sociology of groupthink

Stuff I wish I'd study sometime:

reading holy texts of all major religions (I'm still halfway on this)
CMB radiation
neuroscience and psychology research on meditation, prayer, community rituals

Some potential advantages of being atheist:

In the very long run, you might help humanity find the truth. Truth tends to survive the rise and fall of civilisations, as information is easy to preserve and hard to destroy. A record of your beliefs and actions may be preserved and later read by others even if your nation gets nuked to dust, for example.
People around you might benefit in terms of material wellbeing. Post-Englightenment, there's a direct correlation between countries' GDP growth and their cultural tolerance of atheist scientists and engineers. (I also suspect there's a direct correlation between this tolerance and rate of new inventions by country, but this is harder to prove.)
You might avoid some traps like using medicines that haven't undergone double-blinded randomised control trials and may hence be toxic.
It might improve your critical thinking skills. Many cognitive biases are due to social pressure, learning to resist social pressure will make you a better thinker. Your beliefs may be less compartmentalised, as knowing the truth in one subject also aids with knowing the truth in other subjects (and vice versa knowing falsehoods deteriorates it).

Some potential disadvantages of being atheist:

You may end up distanced from people who no longer share your values. Coordination is easier between people with shared values and beliefs. You may find it harder to coordinate with others.
You may end up distrusting of other people's beliefs. You'll realise truth-seeking is really hard and a lifetime of effort is not enough to discover all the important truths about the world.
You may have more anxiety about the future. You'll realise many events in life are random and beyond your control. (For example, this could be who you date or how good your health is or how a particular exam result went.) You'll realise people often imagine fictitious narratives to make sense of random events, because they don't like random events.
You'll realise most problems in life don't solve themselves, someone needs to actually put in the work to solve them.
You'll have to take life decisions while facing more uncertainty about potential outcomes. You'll realise many facts about our past, present and future are currently unknown. Many of these facts will remain unknown even after you die.
You may become more confused about your morality. You'll realise that different cultures produced people with different moral values.
You'll realise the world is not a fair place, karma doesn't always work. History is full of mass murderers who received more love and popular support than you ever will.
You may end up less satisfied with your present circumstances. Most religions teach some degree of contentment with one's present circumstances.

If you have recently become atheist, especially if you live in India, I encourage being kind to yourself while you figure out its implications for your life. This took me many years to figure out, and could take you as well.

Economic growth of India

I currently have no strong reason to favour economic growth of one country over another country, or to value the happiness or lives of people of one country over another country. I support economic growth of humanity in general, and this includes people in India.

That being said, if you were interested in increasing economic growth rate of India, here's my guesses of how you'd do it. Economic growth is typically of two types.

Zero-to-one scientific innovation
- If you have a lead time of even one month over the rest of the world on some frontier technology, you get revenue and geopolitical power from the whole world. Every additional month or year of lead time makes all the difference.
- Achieving this in India is really hard IMO
- Will require cultural tolerance of atheist scientists and engineers in broader society, and a well-funded political faction backing them.
- For a given research field, there is typically only 1-2 places on Earth where top scientists go. Will require building culture behind such institutions in some fields.
- Will require funding too, although my guess is funding is not the sole factor, and culture is typically a stronger factor than funding behind outcomes of research labs. Indian govt annual revenue is ~$500 billion. Becoming world leader in any field typically requires $100 million to $10 billion in non-profit/govt funding.
- Will require sufficient people to become wealthy enough to join upper / upper-middle class where independent thinking is possible and valued.
- Indian elites choosing to detonate Pokhran nuclear test in May 1974 has likely directly led to US, Russian and China elites and all their allied countries' elites refusing to share tech and infra with the Indian elites. (It has also been a causal factor for why no country is building nuclear power plants and global energy prices are permanently stuck at $0.10/kWh, but that's a separate discussion.)
Globalisation, i.e. copy-pasting innovations that already been successful in other countries
- This is already ongoing in India
- Stronger rule of law and respect for individual property rights will help.
- More free market will help IMO, with less selection of winners by govt. IMO Indian economy should have taken more capitalist direction in 1950s itself instead of waiting till 1990s, if economic growth was the priority.
- This will also need regulatory bodies who are educated about the fields they are regulating.
- Inviting more foreign companies to undertake major infra projects will help. As long as knowledge ends up diffused to people locally, it matters less who invests in the infra or takes governance decisions IMO. Allowing foreign investors to own significant infra projects can be net good for Indian economic growth, depending on the details of the deal. For instance it is important that projects are profitable and financed via equity investors, not via increasing national debt.

Indian political history

I think many leaders in Congress in the period 1950-90 were too sympathetic to economically left-leaning ideals, and this has directly lead to many social ills in today's society, including generational trauma for people whose parents dealt with poverty and poor rule of law, poor rule of law in some places even as of 2025, widespread unemployment as of 2025 and so on.

I am aware it is easy for me to say in hindsight that, let's say, Stalinist communism was doomed to fail, and this was a harder prediction to make back in the 1950s. Nehru was clearly sympathetic to Stalinist economic system and their industry and manufacturing for example.

I see this sympathy for economically left-learning ideology as a broader problem in Indian culture, not just something that its elites supported.

I am aware that many people today are not actually interested in studying history in pursuit of the truth. Instead it is common to suppress or selectively ignore historical facts that risk delegitimising whichever political ideology you happen to support at present.