Introduction #0

3 minute read

In a complicated world, simple explanations don’t work. 

Life in general and intelligence has evolved over millions of years. The universe is a vast place and every passing day we are learning something new about it. A single person during his general lifetime used to interact with a very small percent of the huge amount of information available.

When the internet just came in, it became a place for people to explore a wider variety of ideas, made it easier to access information and that led to information overload. In a complicated world where no single question has a simple answer but rather has just different pieces of information, motivation, and perspective. As the internet grew and the amount of information accessible became too big, the internet evolved in a way to give each one of us our own echo chambers. It again restricted us to interact more with information pieces we already agreed with or were interested in and did little to give us new learnings.

BlueMustard is about trying to build awareness, including self-awareness. This is an initiative to build context. Context has two parts. It has facts and perspectives. A narrative is formed by giving a perspective with the set of facts you choose to focus on. When trying to understand anything new or trying to ponder upon why things are the way they are, the more information you have the better equipped you are.

Facts are facts. Perspectives are theories. Narratives is the story. Facts are hard to dispute, it rarely relies on the motivations of the reasons behind. A happened with B on C date. Perspective and narrative are more subjective which try to describe the reasoning behind it, the possible outcomes, and give you the bigger picture.

Let’s start with the WHY. Over the last few years, I have been closely following a blog called WaitButWhy. For everyone currently reading this first letter, I would have pushed you to read some posts of this blog at some point. This initiative is heavily inspired by WaitButWhy and Crash Course.

BlueMustard is an effort to create a community that wants to keep learning. Ideally, I would want this to be a more collaborative effort but till then you can use the comments section to add comments. Hopefully, this can be an initiative to get a better understanding of how the world is why things work the way they do and why they may turn out to be a different way can we do something better then this be a ground for ideas. At the core, this is about understanding a variety of different perspectives looking at the same thing from multiple perspectives.

This is going to be a personally curated list of things that I find interesting across the web. It would vary from Science and Technology to History and Philosophy.

This is a good opportunity to find out more about the world find out more about yourself over the next few months I will try to build out some system where we can collaborate more and get everyone more involved. You can join the community on the facebook page, this will get updated more frequently and the newsletter would be more a monthly effort to collate all of them.

Do spread the word to people who you think will be helpful in getting the initial community. This is an effort to build a community wants to learn. The first letter goes out this week.