Modern Cynicism

Welcome

This is the theory to unify all existing fragmented ideas on human psychology. I am working on this for last six years, looking at human psychology from the perspective of physics.

I’ve observed that everything humans create is ultimately limited by our own creativity. Think about it. In movies, aliens always end up looking like us. Even AI systems draw inspiration from the human brain. If we could understand human psychology from first principles, we’d have a foundation for understanding almost anything. When you pick up a new subject, it wouldn’t feel completely foreign anymore. You’d connect it to your existing mental models and learn much faster.

Human psychology is a huge topic, though. How do we make it accessible to everyone? Look at mathematics. In its early days, people discussed mathematical ideas verbally because there was no standardized notation. That made it difficult for most people to follow. Today, schoolchildren learn math because we have a formal language built around symbols. The same shift happened with communication and data after Shannon’s 1948 paper, which laid the foundation for the Information Age. Before that, people designed machines and communication networks largely through intuition and experience.

I believe we can do something similar with knowledge itself. I approach human behavior through the philosophy of data. At its core, all human behavior comes down to three basic data operations.

• Data is stored somewhere.
• Computations happen on that data.
• Data moves from one storage location to another.

Everything else, including the complex systems we see in society, consists of abstractions built on top of these operations. These abstractions reduce the energy required to perform them.

Once you understand this pattern, you’ll start seeing it everywhere. In software engineering, economics, productivity, salary negotiations, and even military strategy. The same principles apply across these fields. You become a natural generalist and a stronger critical thinker because you learn a concept once and apply it across multiple domains. As AI takes over more routine tasks, this way of thinking becomes even more valuable. You can focus on directing systems, making decisions, and managing execution while AI handles more of the implementation.

For society, I see this as a direct path to helping people from poorer backgrounds catch up. We’ve all heard the usual advice: read books, work hard, and things will improve. But my experience tells me that this advice misses much of the picture. Some of the deepest knowledge comes from lived experience, not books. We’ve also divided knowledge into separate subjects for specialization, making it harder to connect ideas and develop the kind of thinking that leads to innovation.

My bigger dream is intellectual equality in society. Imagine a future where the child of a wealthy industrialist and the child of an ordinary farmer have the same intellectual capabilities and can discuss complex ideas on equal footing with scientists or anyone else. Institutional barriers would no longer determine who gets to develop their abilities. Access to knowledge and the ability to think independently would drive social mobility, rather than dependence on gatekeepers. For me, intellect means the ability to think for yourself, whether you’re dealing with academics, family matters, or difficult situations at work. In the language of this theory, it means performing those three data operations efficiently: using minimal energy, maximizing rewards, and minimizing harm to others.

This framework has global implications, and India stands to gain enormously because of its large population. If we put these ideas into practice, we can increase innovation across the country and help India become a global superpower. The potential impact is comparable to that of the Industrial Revolution. While much of the current conversation focuses on AI, I want to focus on developing the full potential of human minds. These same principles can also help us build better AI systems in India. By getting the reasoning layer right, we can reduce our dependence on massive datasets, an especially relevant goal given India’s strong solar energy potential.

This is the core of my theory: a single framework that connects ideas we usually treat as separate. As you read further, you’ll see how these patterns connect different fields and how you can apply them to your own life.