Come on in, the water’s fine

Hello to you, the reader!

I am Shreyans Khunteta, also known by Shrey, a software developer, occasional standup comic, mutual aid organiser, writer, Indian, Oregonian, and muller of various thoughts.

I am not an expert on any particular topic - I am merely a vivacious reader who likes to constantly consume information, and then to let that information sit in my head, where I keep turning it over. Sometimes those findings are interesting - here, I’ll put the interesting ones.

Once upon a time, I used to actively use Facebook as a platform for discourse. It was useful to be putting out information that would actually be actionable for people in my community, or observations that someone could get something out of.

I still do sometimes think Facebook has a use. Last year, I ran a mutual aid group called COVID Response Collective that originated from a Facebook post. But I’ve grown weary of communicating in simplistic ways that don’t actually explore topics at hand.

I had a start one day that all I ever do when I use social media to discuss anything, whether it was personal, political, funny, serious…all I ever do is scratch the surface.

So I bring you now to “Beneath the Surface”. Periodically I’ll be finding a topic and going deep into it, discussing it from a variety of different angles, trying to identify the multitude of topics that can exist in any particular subject that may not be initially considered.

Our conversational models are broken. I won’t pretend as though this will fix it, but I want to make this an open newsletter. If you, the reader, want to correspond or add your feedback on an observation I may have, I encourage you to do so. I feel those conversations could be very productive and stimulating.

Unlike social media which prioritises scratching the surface with a large group of people, I am excited to begin this journey of going beneath with you.

I’ll leave with a poem by Richard Feynman, which captures the ethos of this project and is the inspiration. Please enjoy “An Ode To A Flower”.

I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I’ll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe…

I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

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