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The unhealthy use of social media has already created serious damage to society for a decade from now. After the ban of TikTok, the pandemic has also elevated the use of similar social media like Instagram. Kids and teens now spend even more time in gaming and social media to pass their time as there are no schools or no exams. Exams used to create some incentives to sit at the study table. It's not surprising that kids start opening books when there are exams.  Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now But, exams are heavily criticized by educators as it serves to kill and drill methodology of learning. It also impacts the well-being of students and fails to produce kids with critical thinking.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test Already we have entrance exam policies that are based on the teaching to test way of learning.  NEP's obsession with "outcomes" means there will be more tests, exams, not less. With its centralising of ...

Blockchain is a technology that is going to impact every one of us. With blockchain, we can program any incentives design with Turing complete language it uses.  With blockchain, we can build dapps (or decentralization apps) 1) Decentralization Dapps don't have a central authority. Most organizations are centralized, whether Govt or organization like Google or Facebook. Centralization gives them absolute power which they can abuse in their own interest. Take, for example, Facebook to take your private data and give you targeted ads to brainwash you against a party. Google to censor the download of all expensive books, so that poor don't get a chance to learn from these books. Or a central govt who can print a large amount of money to spend for election and win which in contrast can create hyperinflation.  With blockchain, we can decentralize all these systems and hard code the rules of governance which they have to follow and can punish them or remove them if they are found fr...

Threshold Price Paradox: Production requires time which is limited. People are willing to supply at a threshold price or above, but people are unable to demand at that price due to the lack of money. If the price is at the threshold, supply will go on increasing. For example, in case of teacher, if their salary is 20,000 most are likely to hold a job, but below the threshold say 10,000 most are unlikely to join as teacher.  How will the perfect competition solve it? Because in this condition, competition will never push the prices down below the threshold, or if employees agree with little (at below threshold price)  due to unemployment but it makes them unproductive in work as well as life.  In this condition most of the people demand are never met.  In case of teacher, no competition will decrease the price, because taking a class requires about 6 hours of preparation daily. If teachers agree with salary less than 20,000, then they will compromise their time in pre...

Why people dislike Ignou? Here are the reasons for it. The market of lemons or Information asymmetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons 1) People fall into the fallacy trap that more money equals to more value. But with information asymmetry, more money does not necessarily provide more value. 2) People tend to think that qualifying super hard entrances and then getting admitted to college means you will get the best education.  But in reality, these entrances are mainly pointless and you gain no knowledge about your subject of specialization. For example, why study so much of  inorganic chemistry when you need to spend time on algorithms if you will do a degree in computer science.  3) People tend to believe that the correspondence course is less valuable than regular courses. But in reality, ignou courses are not fully correspondence. You would have to attend classes two days a week. That's the right balance of studying at home and getting mentorship we...

  Perfect price discovery is a major challenge in economics. The Internet is skewed up. The advertisement business model has become a terrible incentive model for generating revenue for content.  The advertisement industry relies on views of the website.  Clickbait content whether it is a vulgar joke or rumours or attention-seeking fake news gets more revenue than quality ones.  Imagine how much Einstein's paper would get revenue if the business model was through advertisements. Only a few people would have read and could understand it, so Einstein would have not earned more than a few dollars.  There are alternative models like blockchain where a developer can decide what they want to incentivize. (e.g. Quality content or echo chambers that reinforce their existing views due to confirmation biases) One night after thinking till 1 am, I got a simple equation. Take for example you want to incentivize a quality essay.  Bounty for writing an essay is 1 token: ...

Coronavirus has created a major challenge in our education system. Schools are closed for many months, and teachers are finding ways to teach students remotely. But many are hopelessly failing at it, some think that it doesn’t work as there is limited evidence in support of remote learning in case of kids while others are trying to make it work.  Remote learning requires a different set of tools and different ways of handling students, but the first principles of pedagogy remains the same.  Old habits die hard. Many teachers started blackboard teaching through lecturing remotely through the zoom app or other apps like skype.  What is blackboard teaching? Blackboard teaching is when communication is one-sided with little student engagement. The teacher lectures the content and students listen. But there are serious problems with it.  Here are some of the compilation about patterns of bad teaching: Patterns for bad practices of teaching Remember, a well-designed video ...