Tag: blogs

If It’s Excel, It Must be Chandoo

It doesn’t matter what you do, or are going to do in your career. Excel is an inevitability.

The degree to which you use Excel, the degree of expertise required where Excel is concerned, and the number of hours you spend staring at Excel might vary, both across careers and within the span of each individual careers. But for most of you – and I’m very tempted to say for all of you – Excel is very much an inevitability.

And the single best resource for learning Excel that I am aware of is Chandoo.org. It’s a wonderfully curated blog, this one, with links for basic, intermediate and advanced users, and the associated YouTube channel is also a great way to learn.

If you know your way around Excel in terms of being acquainted with the basics, I’d heavily recommend going through the top 10 formulas for MS-Excel. You probably will not use all of these formulas all the time, but being familiar with them as a student is certainly recommended.

And from there on in, feel free to jump into whatever specific area catches your fancy. Dashboards, charts, advanced formulas would be my recommendations for intermediate users (and I don’t know enough about Excel to call myself an advanced user!).

Here’s the dirty little secret about Excel: you really learn Excel when you meet a problem you need to solve in the real world. Excel, when taught well, is a lot of fun to learn in the classroom. But the real learning takes place, as I said, in the real world.

And the best compliment I can pay Chandoo is that his posts have often helped me out there in the wild, and not just in the cosy confines of academia. And I am sure his awesome blogs will continue to help me in the future as well!

Chandoo, thank you for your generosity with your mastery in MS-Excel!

Blogging Everyday

I try to blog everyday, and as some of my regular readers might know, I don’t always succeed.

Why do I try to blog everyday?

Many reasons, but here are the top three. First, it helps makes concepts clear in my mind. Second, it instils a sense of discipline. Call it rountine, and I might even accept that it has become an addiction, but in this case, I would say it is entirely worth it. And third, my blog has become my note-taking tool. Increasingly, I end up searching my own blogposts regarding concepts I’m sure I’ve come across before. If it was important to me, I am sure I must have written about it.

There are other advantages – I’ve gotten work as a consequence of writing here, I’ve made friends and I’ve met lots of very interesting people. To cut a long story short, there are many, many advantages and virtually no downsides. You don’t get to be as lazy as you’d like to be, it is true, but people tell me that’s a good thing. Who knows, they may well be right.

There are two people I look up to when it comes to blogging every single day, come rain or shine. The name of one of them is likely to be familiar to many of you – Tyler Cowen, of course.

The other is Seth Godin.

I don’t know for how long now, but Seth has been blogging for easily more than fifteen years at least. And when I say he has been blogging for fifteen years, I mean that he has been blogging every single day for those fifteen years (and probably more). I could look up the exact number, but the point in this case ins’t the statistic itself, it is admiration for being able to keep at it for so long. It’s a habit I admire and envy, and it is a habit I aspire to. And like Jessica Hagy the other day, so also with this post. It is a tribute of sorts, and also a way to introduce some of you to bloggers who I read without fail.

Seth has over the years introduced me to authors, introduced me to concepts, taught me fun ways of thinking about stuff, made me rethink simple math, and above all – and I’ll never be able to thank him enough for this – introduced me to good bread (and do read other posts he has written in honor of Poilane). There’s so much more on his blog that trying to create a list is pointless – as with Jessica’s blog, so also with Seth’s, but even more so. Dip in, and see what catches your fancy.

Above all, though, Seth has taught me three things. He has taught me that everything that I do is marketing. Every single thing. Now, I can tell you that this means I’m not a very good marketer, but the good news is that I have one more reason to try and be better at everything I do. But he also has taught me that marketing isn’t a fad, a gimmick or a thing to be sneered at. On the contrary, it is an indispensable skill.

Two, he has taught me to show up every single day. In fact, the phrase “show up” and the word “ship” I will forever associate with Seth. If you are confused about why a marketer is talking about ships, note that we’re talking about the verb, not the noun – and I’ll reiterate my invitation to dip into his blog. I ship a blogpost daily on this blog – or try to, at any rate, purely because I admire his (and Tyler’s) tenacity and gumption. Read what he had to say about this back in 2013, when he wrote his 5000th (yup, not a typo) post:

My biggest surprise? That more people aren’t doing this. Not just every college professor (particularly those in the humanities and business), but everyone hoping to shape opinions or spread ideas. Entrepreneurs. Senior VPs. People who work in non-profits. Frustrated poets and unknown musicians… Don’t do it because it’s your job, do it because you can.
The selfishness of the industrial age (scarcity being the thing we built demand upon, and the short-term exchange of value being the measurement) has led many people to question the value of giving away content, daily, for a decade or more. And yet… I’ve never once met a successful blogger who questioned the personal value of what she did.

https://seths.blog/2013/06/the-5000th-post/

(And as an economist, that second paragraph is so much food for thought!)

And finally, he’s taught me to think daily. This is related to the second point, but this is important enough to be a point all on its own. You see, writing daily becomes a habit if you do it long enough. But even more importantly, you realize very quickly that writing something daily also means having to think daily. And you’d be surprised at how good we all are at going though the day without thinking. If you don’t know what I mean, I invite you to try and write daily.

Thank you for leading by example, Seth, and for showing up everyday.

In Praise of Jessica Hagy

This is the latest post from Jessica Hagy, and I’m really hoping you’re asking “Who she?”, because that’s what today’s post is all about.

As we come to the end of the year, I want to spend some time thinking about what I learnt (and what I didn’t learn) this year, and utilize my regrets from this year to try and make the next one better. But I also want to try and spend some time reflecting on a rather niche topic. Blogs that I have enjoyed reading for many, many years – and those that I would like to share with you.

I may come across as being ever so slightly biased, given that you are reading this on my blog, but I do wish more people would blog. I’ve touched upon this topic many times in the past, and will no doubt talk about it in the future as well. But at the risk of sounding like a broken record, here goes: creating something on a daily basis becomes a superpower over time.

And especially relevant to today’s post is the choice of verb in the last part of that last sentence: creating. A blog need not be about writing everyday, and Jessica’s isn’t. But this, counterintuitively, is what makes it so very powerful.

Jessica draws ideas.

I cannot tell you how much I envy her ability to do this. I prefer to think in words (if that makes any sense). If somebody asks me to explain something, I much prefer to think and speak using words and sentences, and I think I am reasonably good at coming up with an analogy that helps people understand the point I am trying to make. Or given that I teach for a living, I hope that is the case!

But Jessica? She explains ideas by drawing ’em.

If you’re looking for an example, ask yourself how I might explain the concept of, say, complements and substitutes. I might write an explainer post, or I might ask you to think about one of my all-time favorite metaphors (created by Steve Jobs), or I might long and tedious ruminations on AI and human creativity.

Jessica? She believes in the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words:

https://thisisindexed.com/2022/12/diversify-or-cannibalize/

If you think of yourself and AI as having duplicate skills, there is going to be competition between you and the AI. But if you can think of yourself and AI as having complementary skills, you are likely to make a powerful team. I have said the exact same thing that she did (in the context of my example), but there is no question about the fact that she said it much more pithily, and therefore better.

How to express an idea so that it reasonates? How to express an idea so that its applicability becomes clear within a domain? How to express an idea so that people understand that it is applicable across domains? These are questions I think about literally all the time as a teacher, and as with everybody else in this profession, I don’t always get the right answer while teaching.

All the more reason to admire folks who do get the answers to these questions, and have been doing so for much more than a decade(!). Yup, that’s right – Jessica’s blog has been around for a very long time, and scrolling down her seemingly infinte blogposts with a cup of coffee for company (or, if you like, as a complement) is a wonderful way to spend an hour or ten. Llook out for her entry from the 5th of December 2022 if you plan to do this today, and elt me know if you liked it as much as I did.

Jessica has books out, including one that I’m especially looking forward to reading, called The Art of War Visualized. Another of her books is an extension of a lovely little series of sketches that she drew for Forbes, called How to be Interesting. You could, in fact, think of this post as an application of her second drawing/point in that series.

This is her info page, this is the About page from her blog, this is her Twitter account, and this is her Wikipedia entry. Finally, this is her Amazon author page.

If you have found out about her work through this post, I hope you consider subscribing to her work, and I hope you enjoy learning from it as much I have. And I hope you join in me in thanking her for making the world that little bit clearer, and therefore better.

Thank you!

Ways to Learn Outside of College

Outside of college doesn’t necessarily mean not enrolling in college. It means complementing whatever it is that you’re learning in college.

  1. Listen in on Twitter. I’ll use economics as an example, but I’m sure this applies to practically any subject. Listening in means quite literally listening in to people in the field having a debate about, well practically anything. #EconTwitter is a useful way to get started. This tweet, for example, was fourth or fifth in the “Top” section at the time of writing this blogpost.
  2. Learn what lists on Twitter are, and either follow lists made by others, or start creating your own. This list, for example, is of folks on Twitter who have been guests on The Seen And The Unseen (TSATU).
  3. We’ll resume our regular programming from the next point onwards, but just in case you’ve been living under a rock, listen to The Seen And The Unseen. Multi-hour episodes, well over two hundred of them. Each of them with guests who are experts in the real, meaningful sense of the term. Each backed with impeccable research by Amit Varma. All for free. What a time to be alive.
  4. Following topics on Twitter is often more useful than following people on Twitter, although as always, TALISMAN.
  5. Why not read about each Nobel Prize in economics, say at the rate of one a week? Here’s the complete list of Nobel Prize winners. Here’s the 2020 prize winners page. If you are an undergraduate student, focus on the popular science version. If you are a Master’s student, read the more arcane version. Of course, nothing prevents you from reading both, no matter what level of economics you are comfortable with. 🙂 An idea that I have been toying with for a year: a podcast about the winners, created in the style of this podcast. This also ought to be done for all of India’s Prime Ministers, but that is a whole separate story.
  6. Blogs! There are far too many blogs on economics out there, all of them unbelievably excellent. Some are directly about economics, some are tangentially about economics, some aren’t about economics at all, and those are the very best kind. Read more blogs! Here’s how I read blogs, if that helps.
  7. YouTube. 3Blue1Brown, Veritasium, Kurzgesagt, Sky Sports Masterclasses on Cricket (yes, seriously), and so, so, so many more! One of my targets for the coming months is to curate my YouTube feed the way I have curated my Twitter feed. Suggestions are always welcome!
  8. Podcasts.
    Amit Varma responded on Twitter recently to a question put up by Peter Griffin. The question was this. Amit’s reply was this.
    Alas, this applies to me. My podcast listening has gone down due to the pandemic. One, because I have not been in a frame of mind to listen for extended periods of these past eighteen months. Two, because my listening was usually while driving. But still, podcasts. My top three are (or used to be): Conversations With Tyler, EconTalk and TSATU.
    (And one day, so help me god, I will write a blog post about WordPress’ new editor. Why can one not embed a tweet in a numbered list in the 21st year of the 21st century?! And they call this a modern editor! Bah.)

Questions about Veritasium (as just one example), and how that might possibly relate to economics might arise in some reader’s minds. Two responses: don’t compartmentalize learning. Ask, for example, about the economics of producing videos such as these. Second, learning about other subjects (interdisciplinary learning in fancypants English) is helpful in many, many different ways. Ditto with Sky Sports Cricket Masterclasses. Learn about training like an athlete, and then watch Adam Gilchrist talk about training with his dad. (The first couple of minutes, that’s all).

The larger point about the list is this: there really is no excuse left to not learn a little bit more about any subject. Learning can (and should) be a lifelong affair. And the role of college, especially in the humanities, is to help foster that environment of learning, and to act as guides for young folks just about to embark on their (lifelong) journey of learning.

Or, to put it even more succinctly, we need to have classrooms act as complements to online learning, not as a substitute for it. And that needs to happen today, not some vague day in the future.

Links for 17th May, 2019

  1. “Despite the 73rd and 74th Constitutional amendments, except in a few states, there has been little progress at decentralization—to both rural and urban local bodies. Most state governments have been reluctant to devolve the functions, funds and functionaries for delivering public services at the local level. The functions assigned are unclear, funds uncertain and inadequate, and decision-making functionaries are mostly drawn from the state bureaucracy. Local bodies do not even have powers to determine the base and rate structure of the taxes assigned to them. The states have not cared to create institutions and systems mandated in the Constitution, including the appointment of the State Finance Commissions, and even when they are appointed, states have not found it obligatory to place their reports in the legislature. In fact, the local bodies are not clear about delivering local public goods, with the prominent agenda of implementing central schemes obscuring their functions.”
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    M. Govinda Rao pulls no punches in pointing out how and why decentralization hasn’t (and likely will not) taken place in India. This is a conversation more people need to be having in India – and in particular, to aid meaningful urbanization.
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  2. “I love this paper because it is ruthless. The authors know exactly what they are doing, and they are clearly enjoying every second of it. They explain that given what we now know about polygenicity, the highest-effect-size depression genes require samples of about 34,000 people to detect, and so any study with fewer than 34,000 people that says anything about specific genes is almost definitely a false positive; they go on to show that the median sample size for previous studies in this area was 345.”
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    Slate Star Codex helps us understand the importance of learning (and applying!) statistics. The website is more than worth following, by the way.
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  3. “Sucking the life out of a mango is one of those primal pleasures that makes life feel worthwhile. The process is both elaborate and rewarding. The foreplay that loosens up the pulp inside, the careful incision at the top that allows access without a juice overrun, and then the sustained act of sucking every bit juice from the helpless peel. Senses detach themselves from the body and attach themselves to the mango, and even mobile phones stop ringing. The world momentarily rests in our mouths as we slurp, suck and slaver at the rapidly disappearing pulp. The mango is manhandled vigorously till only the gutli remains which is scraped off till it has nothing left to confess. As is evident, there is no elegant way to eat this kind of mango, no delicate and dignified method that approximates any form of refinement, which is just as well, for the only way to enjoy a mango is messily.”
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    An excellent column about an excellent fruit – there isn’t that much more to say! I completely agree with the bit about serving aamras front and center, rather than as an afterthought, by the way.
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  4. “Welcome to the 4th Annual Top Economics Blogs list. For the 2019 edition, we’ve added many newcomers, as well as favorites which continue to provide quality insight year after year. Like lists in previous years (2018, 2017, 2016), the new 2019 list features a broad range of quality blogs in practically every economic discipline. Whether you are interested in general economics or prefer more specific topics such as finance, healthcare economics, or environmental economics; there is something here for you. You will also find blogs which focus on microeconomics, macroeconomics, and the economics of specific geographical regions.Whether you are a student, economics professional, or just someone with a general interest in how economic issues affect the world around you, you’re certain to find the perfect blog for your specific needs.”
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    The most comprehensive answer to that most perennial of questions: what should I read?
    Bonus! If you’re wondering how to keep up with all of this, this might help.
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  5. “India should do the same with our state capitals. The Union government can create fiscal and other incentives to encourage state governments to shift their capitals to brown- or green-field locations. Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Jaipur or Lucknow, for instance, will continue to thrive even if the state government offices move out. Their respective states will benefit from a new urban engine powered by government.”
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    I have been sceptical about the feasibility of doing something like this – my reading of urbanization has always been that it more of an organic process – cities grow (or not) of their own accord, and rarely as a planned endeavor. But maybe I’m wrong?