Why Twitter is the single most important learning tool & how to take the most out of it

NOTE: We don't inhabit a fragmented reality. Nothing around us can be isolated from the catastrophic effects of the pandemic we're witnessing. All further posts on this blog will carry this caveat until there is some reasonable accountability established and substantial actions taken against the state's criminal abdication of responsibility. 

Twitter: The ultimate learning tool

I have two aims with this article:

1. Convince people who are not on twitter to come to twitter and leverage it as a learning tool

2. Convince people who are already on twitter to change the way they curate their feed to optimize their learning experience. 

I have written earlier in a piece titled 'Focus on principles and not on routines' on why I prefer not to read most things that start with 'How to'. My argument was:

"Even though my initial reaction to anything that’s about life and wellness and starts with ‘How to…’ is to not take it seriously. It’s a mix of the cognizance that most ‘How to’ articles are a sham and exploit the vulnerability of people desperately trying to fix their lives for likes and views, and a broader understanding that when it comes to life and how to better live it – no single approach works alike for two people. Copying someone will almost always lead to failure because what works for person X is dependent on their background conditions (such as education, personality, friends, parents, attitude, habits etc.), and person Y can never get the same results by trying to copy what X did because they cannot replicate the exact same conditions".

So at the outset I want to set some qualifications for this post. The reason why I decided to write a "how to" article (much against my will) is because I have had enough time to study my behavior, gather insights and observe various trials and errors to synthesize a set of principles on leveraging twitter as a learning tool. And I think the method and insight has a very high output to input ratio. I encourage you to find the principle behind this article and extrapolate it for yourself.

The idea for writing this piece came to me in a series of conversations I had with my sister and a couple of friends. I was trying to make a case for twitter as a learning resource to them. And all of them were and are pretty adamant about not joining twitter (1) because they see it as the scum of the earth where nothing but endless trolling happens and nuance dies a thousand death. Both of these things are probably true for most people. But they are not universally true. And they surely do not have to be true for you if you chose to actively optimize your experience (2). I have been able to, so you should be able to, too. What one monkey can do, the other can too (3).

Before going into the why and how of this article, I want to flag off this one podcast conversation between two of my (now) favorite people - Ashish Kulkarni and Navin Kabra. They talk extensively about twitter and how to leverage it as a learning resource. I'd highly recommend listening to this conversation as a broader context for this piece. 

Making the case for Twitter as a learning tool 

I discovered twitter around July last year (2020). And within a few months of being on the platform understood the sheer learning potential and value of this tool. There was an information explosion in my life on a scale I could barely keep up with (and still cannot). I suddenly had access to all kinds of information - brilliant threads on a wide variety of interesting subjects, longform articles, podcasts, interesting accounts giving impactful advice on everything from career, love, how to live a better life etc. I fell in love with it. Because it was also the time when most of our life moved online, I now had better access to information regarding webinars, workshops and seminars. Information I would not have had access to, had I not been on twitter. A trend that still continues. Twitter helped me really connect to the world in a meaningful way when it came to raw information and access to knowledge. 

Twitter as informational treasure 

You need to appreciate two things here. Firstly, irrespective of whether you are someone who is generally curious about various things or someone who is looking into a specific field or discipline, twitter is a great tool for all kinds of people. The reason behind this is that it is a platform which by it's very nature is used by all kinds of people to share all kinds of interesting information with each other(4). Secondly, twitter is the only place where you have access to information at such a large scale in the same place. There is no other platform that hosts these many interesting people who are active. For example if you're a student like me, you probably want to see what your favorite professors are up to. Where can you get that information? LinkedIn? Probably not. Their work profile? Probably not. Their Instagram? Too many failure cases - they could either not be on the platform, or may have a private account, or even if have an open active account, do not post about academic papers and conferences alongside the photo of the latest salad they ate. Facebook? Probably not. (Also I was never a fan of the FB newsfeed algorithm)

So my first argument is that twitter is great because not only do you have access to more learning resources than any other place, but also because it hosts the largest amount of interesting people who share cool things with everyone. For free.

The other supremely important feature of twitter is the bookmark feature. It basically lets you bookmark and save any tweet (can be a thread, a link, a video - any tweet) to be accessed later all in one place. Even a casual scroll down your twitter timeline will show you multiple things you'd like to read.  And of course as a human with limited time and attention you cannot impulsively consume everything as and when you see it. Then this feature comes handy. I often say that in order to really get a glimpse of a person, look at their twitter bookmarks (if they want to show it to you, of course #privacymatters). Also because your bookmark rate is always higher than your reading rate, there will always be umpteen resources for you to read at any time. Feeling bored? Twitter bookmarks await you. 

To emerge as a competitor to Clubhouse, twitter shipped its spaces feature sometime back. Even though it limits hosting spaces only to people with 600 or more followers, this has added a new dimension i.e. audio information to the already information rich platform. I have attended many fantastic spaces conversations, and there is always one or the other interesting space being hosted if you follow the right people. 

Therefore as someone who is not on twitter you are not only missing out on the vast general information that is put out and aggregated uniquely on twitter, you are also loosing out on a great archiving tool such as the bookmarks and a whole new informational tool i.e. spaces. The cost of not being on twitter simply keeps increasing everyday.

To put things into perspective let me give you two concrete examples:

1. I was able to attend multiple conferences by my favorite places like IFF, DGN, Medianama, The Dialogue, SFLC etc. only because I got to know of these activities via twitter. There was (and still is - unless you obsessively keep checking every individual website, which by the way isn't the best practice because not everyone regularly updates it) no other way I could get to know of these interesting and exciting things.

2. I am currently attending a summer academy by LPE Project on Monopolies and regulated industries. The only reason I could apply for the academy (which by the way was free, bless Amy and everyone at the place) was because they posted about it on their twitter and I happened to come across it. If I hadn't been on twitter it is very likely that I wouldn't have known about it and would have lost such an exciting learning opportunity.

So to close this section, the argument I'm making is that not being on twitter puts you in an informationally disadvantaged position as compared to those who are on twitter and optimize their experience for learning. Any rational individual I know of would want to be in a position where they have access to more information that is interesting and beneficial to them. Therefore, not being on twitter is not a net zero position. You incur huge learning costs due to not being on twitter. And every day you're not on twitter, the costs are multiplying. 

Twitter as a connection tool

There are two things here as well. First, twitter massively brings down the barrier to communicate with high status individuals you have no other way of communicating otherwise. And I really mean it. No other way. Second, since a lot of people share a wide variety of interesting material here, you are likely to come across such cool people and be able to connect with them. That doesn't work for other platforms because the quantity and quality of information being shared is different. Thus such platforms are likely to not be actively inhabited by interesting people, and that in turn makes it is very less likely for you to come across such cool people in the first place (5). To put it in one line, the design of all other apps is optimized for entertainment, whereas Twitter is optimized for information and knowledge. But really, the more important point here is the first one, and also has been the most exciting for me. 

My personal observation is that a high status individual is more likely to respond to you on twitter than anywhere else. My hypothesis is that since twitter has more of the 'intellectual types' - professors, public thinkers, lawyers, policy folks, economists etc. (which is primarily what my twitter is, I do not follow anything that even remotely resembles entertainment with the exception of the daily hera pheri meme project - that does not count, it is a part of my life), the kind of things they are likely to tweet or retweet are more likely to be an intellectual point, debate or opinion. Information of such nature is likely to involve, not always but most times an intelligent debate - students, practitioners and professionals engaging in arguments exchange without being hostile (6). So, if you comment or tweet to such individuals a genuine question or argument you have, because it is intelligent (of course do not substitute twitter for google), they are very likely to respond to you and engage with you. Now this is not to say that all or even majority of debates surrounding most things on twitter are civil. It is quite the opposite. Which is where the power you have to carefully curate your feed comes in, which we will talk about later. 

Like last time, I will give you concrete examples. Also note that I'm deliberately using the word 'connecting' instead of 'networking'. To me networking is something you do with a pre planned agenda in mind (mostly revolves around utilitarian things such as internships, jobs, gigs etc.) because of which the substance of your interaction with the other person is likely to be shallow since for you the conversation is really a segway into asking a different type of question. Leave that to LinkedIn. Anyhow, here are the examples:

1. I am an absolute fan of Daphne Keller. She is one of the foremost thinkers on first amendment issues and platform regulation (among a wide variety of other things). It so happened that I heard somebody make the argument during a discussion on the new IT guidelines that really intrigued me, and left me with multiple questions. I tried to search for answers online but could not find any. Then I decided to contact the expert. I tweeted out my question to Daphne and viola! she responded. (Also keep in mind that it was a HUGE fanboy moment for me!!)

2. As a law student the best use of twitter for me is to be able to access the thoughts, materials and resources shared by students, practitioners, teachers and academics in my discipline. Twitter overwhelmingly provides me with 'extra reading' material. No need to subscribe to obscure blogs or newsletters, twitter has it all. This time around I was researching for an upcoming article I am writing on the impact of a recent judgement in Kenya that involves something called the Basic structure doctrine (8). Now, it so happened that I came across a blog post written by an acclaimed constitutional scholar named Yaniz Roznai on that very issue. Naturally I commented with a request for providing more clarity regarding an aspect of my research. And you guessed it right, Yaniv responded! (my small claim to legal fame)

3. Shruti Rajagopalan figures in my top three intellectual idols. I am always in an infinite awe of the knowledge and precision with with she articulates complex topics and issues. I first heard her on Amit Varma's podcast - 'The seen and the unseen' (Amit also figures in my top three), and now (fortunately for people like me) hosts her own brilliant podcast called 'Ideas of India'. The case in point is that I once tweeted a thread trying to unpack certain questions I had regarding a concept called Hayek's knowledge problem and the ability of CEO's of large companies to make good decisions for the company and CC'd her (9). To my complete surprise and borderline shock, Shruti personally messaged me her answer and we went on to have a conversation. I'm reproducing a portion of our conversation here. (Absolute Fanboy moment) 

To close this section and argument, the point I wanted to make was that twitter significantly increases the opportunity for you to nerd out. And of course connecting with people you admire and cool people you come across on the platform further leads to better informational curation and dissemination within the app. And that is an amplificatory loop. The more you engage with people you find cool and are interested in, the more interesting the app experience will become for you. It has worked for me, it should work for you too. Also, with respect to generally connecting on twitter, my limited knowledge and experience tells me that there are a lot of high status individuals who will not care how many followers you have, or which institution you are from and will engage with you on your intellectual (or even silly! Who knows) quests. So if you want to be able to have a shot at interacting with your idols and people you find really interesting, twitter is the place to be. Patrick Collison of Stripe says that the smallest habit that makes the biggest difference for him is his habit to reach out to people whose work he admires. Reach out, accha lagta hai. Dono ko. 

HOW TO use twitter as a learning tool

Having explored the reasons as to why you should join twitter, I now want to talk about the most important issue at hand. Which is of optimizing your twitter experience. The reason why it is important is because if you are an average joe who uses twitter the same way you use every other social media, twitter will also become like every other social media - pointless, toxic, superficial and frustrating. Platforms are susceptible to your choices and decisions you take with respect to the content you wish to consume. It is the feature of the decade i.e. Customizability of user experience. The more my social media reflects my tastes and liking, the more likely I am to remain active on it. However this feature has mostly lead to either frustrating or actively harmful effects. Frustrating in cases of apps like Instagram where if you once watch a football reel, the next five reels in that endless scroll are of football and your curation messes up. Actively harmful in cases of apps like Facebook in which such reflection of one's preferences and liking leads to creating of echo chambers that has real world harmful implications. Many will argue that the same case also applies to twitter. Which in my opinion would not be entirely wrong. But we will discuss now how you can sidestep this problem. 

So the core idea here is the fact that you can have large control over your feed and what you consume. If you don't think that is true, refer to the analysis I've given earlier for why such a feature is profit inducing and thus prioritized by companies. So if you don't want to trust me, trust the market! You can control what you consume and curate your feed over time for very specific types of content, no matter how niche. Individual's who complain of twitter as a toxic space also make a conscious consumption choice. It is just that they trick themselves into thinking that it is the way things are. The bad side of twitter is not the natural content value embedded in the platform in any way. That is not and doesn't not have to be your default user experience. 

The rules that I am outlining ahead are in my opinion, the key to a fruitful and productive user experience on twitter that helps you leverage the vast learning potential of the platform. These are in no way the only rules, or even the best rules - just the rules I see working out for the most people and of course myself.

1. Follow only those who you really want to hear from most of the times 

Contained within this rule are two qualifications, or filter process as I like to call it. First is follow the people that you really want to follow and hear from. Not people you think might be good to follow, or can turn out to be good to follow. Make an active judgement call on who you really want to follow. A decision to follow someone has a huge impact on your feed, and thus there are huge costs associated with following someone. Therefore, do a cost benefit analysis and only follow someone if you think that the benefit of following them outweighs the costs of giving them a little control over your feed (because invariably their likes and retweets and other engagements will show up on your feed too). The second qualification is that you want to hear from them most of the times. What this really means is that you may want to follow person X because they are a great thinker, but they post a lot of things that are either irrelevant or unnecessary (in the context and assumption that learning is the lens with which you are making the decision of what is relevant and necessary) for you in addition to the portion of the things that are interesting to you. Thus on a scale, the cost of following person X outweighs the benefit of following them and thus you do not want to give them any control over your feed. 

2. Unfollow ruthlessly 

Continuing with our previous argument that following someone is not a choice you make in a vacuum and that it has huge associated costs, you want to continually keep evaluating your decision to follow someone by subjecting them to the twin filter test highlighted above. You can develop and add more tests, but I think these two are indispensable. So anyone who does not come up to this standard must be unfollowed without any hesitancy. The reason why you want to be ruthless is because the main aim that you ideally want to use twitter for is learning, and that is a function of how well crafted your feed is, and that in turn is only decided by who you follow. So if you want maximum learning, you want to minimize those accounts that do not provide you much value.

3. Do not follow friends, entertainment accounts, news accounts, or anything not intrinsically linked to learning 

This is is the most important curation decision that I figured out early in the game. You do not want to follow friends because you do not primarily associate or engage in learning, or at least not most of the times. Leave memes to Instagram. The only friends you do want to follow are either friends who you see passing the filter tests, or people you want to remain connected over twitter for sharing or talking about issues. You do not want to follow entertainment accounts for the same reason. 

The decision to not follow news accounts or personalities requires a bit of justification. I will give you three reasons why following these accounts is likely to diminish your ability to learn on twitter:

a) It is the genesis of fake news 

b) These are the posts and threads where the scum of the earth example fits. Political debates over twitter are the worst because political debates around ideology are inherently nuanced debates with many complex parts. A platform like twitter with its restrictive word limit leads to death of nuance and amplification of trolling. The best way to sidestep all of this is to simply not follow these accounts

c) Political debates are naturally zero sum games unless entered into with the willingness to learn. The very nature of political debates is that one person wants to 'win' over the other using any means and methods possible which incentivizes them to speak lies, twist facts, troll, and do all kinds of bad things. The only way one can 'win' is if the other 'loses'. And in a post truth world where we have lost our consensus on what counts as facts, the adjudication of these debate has become even more difficult. All political debate is no, but instead of yes, and. (10)

4. Do not worry about followers 

Once on twitter, do not chase numbers. Chasing followers is a status game. You use high numbers to inflate your ego and signal to others your superiority. All status games are also zero sum games. You start to think in terms of winning and loosing when you compare your follower count to others. But more importantly why you don't need to worry about followers is that a low follower count does not hinder you in any way from exploring and leveraging all the amazing resources and content that exists on the platform. Remember that our aim is to use twitter as a learning tool. Here I want to address one common complain of people regarding low follower count, "I want to share my ideas with others and engage with them. What is the point of being on twitter if there is no one or very less people to share my work with? I do not want to scream in the void". And that is a valid point. But before I say anything else, realize that for the most part people will not really care about most things you will say. I currently have 192 followers, and most of my tweets on an average get less than 15 favorites and the comment density would be as less than one comment per ten tweets. Hard life. So for the most part you do not want to think about how many people follow you or engage with you. Because the previous argument makes the value judgement that twitter isn't worth it based on less engagement argument while wholly discounting the huge learning benefit which is free from dependence on your followers. That is a bad judgement call. Also as I mentioned earlier, even despite having close to 200 followers, I hardly receive any engagement and thus very little to zero learning takes place due to it anyway. 

The way I put engagement as a learning source in context is to look at it as a type II benefit. Which is to say that when you are a newbie on twitter, or someone with low follower count, you are in what I call type I stage i.e. in a stage where engagement doesn't contribute a lot to your learning. Now, what happens when you cross a certain number of followers is that the likelihood of interesting and cool people to follow you also increases. Thus not only does engagement with your tweets increase, but some part of those comments are also insightful and interesting. Thus you enter what I call a type II environment, where your learning is not limited to people you follow and things you come across on your feed, but can also be found in your followers engagement with you. That is what I call a type II benefit, an icing on the cake. Really improves the taste of the cake, but its absence doesn't and shouldn't stop you from enjoying the cake.

The next question of course is how do we increase our follower count? Honestly I have no idea. If I knew, I would have used it and would not be at 190. But here goes nothing. One way to increase your followers is to provide value. That may be in any form. Subject yourself and your tweets to the same tests we've outlined here and tweet accordingly. But most importantly do not do this as a means to gain followers because it will not sustain. In my opinion, putting out valuable things is a function of your curiosity. If you're passionate about something or interested in something, tweet about it. Write about it and post there. Mention your idols. Ask them questions. Find other people who are interested in the same fields. All of this is likely to attract like minded people, and hopefully can take you from type I learning to type II learning. But of course there is no telling how much time that may take. I have seen people who are on twitter and have actively been tweeting since 2012 with under 100 followers, and I've also seen people who have been on twitter for six months or so with 5k followers. Moral of the story is engagement as a learning tool is an icing on the cake at best, and for the most part that does not hinder your experience or ability to leverage the platform in any way. Don't think about it too much.

5. Do not impulsively enter into no, but mode

A no, but mode is your urge to react to something that you do not agree with and want to respond to. Giving in to such urges always is likely to draw you into mindless and senseless debates on twitter. Not to say that you should not disagree with anything on twitter, of course you can. But first ask yourself if you really want to respond, and if you can adequately respond within the word limit. 99% of your urge to respond to something will not be able to pass these two tests. Apply them. But there is a better and deeper explanation for why you must take the yes, and path.

A rule that I have developed for myself is this (11). If a tweet makes me feel strongly and I want to respond immediately in the state of heightened emotions - I do not respond. I Stop. I reflect on the disagreement. Think about it a bit more. Spend time on the nuance. I try to use this time to think and write about it. You can write about it maybe in your journal if you do not want to share your thoughts publicly. The benefit of this approach is that not only do you stop yourself from being derailed and getting sucked into an argument that will take a lot of time off your schedule, you also improve the quality of your response due to the time you've spent on thinking more about the issue. 

Note: I am aware that a lot of people use twitter for voicing their opinions and outrage. And more power to them. This piece is not offering a value judgement on individuals who do that. However in my opinion, there does appear to be some sort of trade off involved between outrage and pure 'learning'. Now of course learning is an inherent part of debates. Trust me, I know this. I've been competitively debating for over a decade now. However as outlined earlier there have to be certain pre conditions to be in place for the debate to act as a learning experience rather than a zero sum game. Debates on twitter surrounding most things are subject to platform constraints of many kinds - word limit being the foremost. A lot of the arguments are lost in the translation from thoughts to text to interpretation and reply. Most people who are typing furiously on twitter engaging in debates are not entering those debates with a mind set of learning. The only mind set is to win the argument. And as mentioned earlier, the platform constraints plus a post truth misinformation society makes even the adjudication of such debates impossible. It's literally a black hole. And you know what? There are no benefits of being sucked into one. So when I advise you not to engage on mindless debates on twitter, this is not me suggesting that all debates on twitter are pointless or more absurdly, the whole act of disagreeing and debating is pointless. Of course not. I'm merely drawing on my insights to explain that there does appear to be some sort of trade off involved between these two and you might want to keep this in mind when curating your feed. 

Concluding thoughts

These are just some of the rules I like to observe to help me improve and maintain the quality of my feed. It also helps me optimize my learning experience and extract the most useful resources out of twitter. At the moment of writing this post, I am following 97 accounts. I used to follow close to 150 at some point, but I periodically clean my following list to help keep my feed updated with my preferences and likings.

Lastly to sum it all up, my argument is that in a comparative between being on twitter versus not being on twitter, you are in a much better position with respect to learning and accessing interesting and useful information by being on twitter. Of course being on twitter magically cannot give you the optimal results, you will have to put in some efforts. But as I have argued earlier, the output to input ratio of maintaining a good feed is really high and with only a few periodic steps, you will be able to extract the maximum out of the platform. 

Being on twitter > Not being on twitter.

Exhibit One:

Exhibit Two: 

Exhibit Three:

Exhibit Four:

Exhibit Five: 

Exhibit Six: 

P.S: If you decide to join twitter, or optimize your twitter experience after reading this article, I'd very much like to know! I'm on twitter as @DembiDivyanshu.

Footnotes & Comments:

(1): One of them has signed up on twitter but with much hesitancy and on a trial basis. I think there is a chance they might leave the platform, so I also wanted to write this piece to convince them to stay. Which is also how you know this is not a clickbait title. It is as if I am giving advice to my close friends. 

(2): Navin Kabra in his podcast with Ashish made the argument that platforms reflect your inputs and behaviors in terms of UX and curation of feed. Which is why one should be economical about one's engagement with the tool. 

(3): Naval Ravikant makes a very interesting and ambitious argument when he argues that happiness is a skill we all can learn and build on. And he argued that because he went from being poor and miserable to being rich and happy, others can too. He has learnt the skill to be happy, and thus anyone else can too.

(4) Including, and not limited to information about academic conferences, workshops, new papers written by authors, or sharing papers that they really liked, writing really insightful academic opinions via threads, links to really great videos, information about upcoming events etc.

(5) A good example of a coherent logic chain. I am currently teaching debating to students at the Welham Boys school and one of the first lessons I taught them regarding arguments is that they are based on a causal chain of statements.

(6) A prime example of this is the multiple exchanges between Ashish Kulkarni, Murali Neelkantan and Shruti Rajagopalan on the vaccine policy and acquisition in India. All of three of them are united in their disbelief for how much the Indian government screwed up the most basic economics things regarding vaccines but differ on the process and mode of pricing and acquisition. 

(7) The intriguing argument being made was that certain country to country trade agreements have a specific country's municipal (domestic) laws embedded in them which offer certain protection to the companies of that country operating elsewhere. In this context it was that a legislation named section 230 of the communications decency act (THE act that shields all social media platforms from being prosecuted for hosting any illegal content uploaded by any user in the US) that was argued to be embedded in certain MOUs that Twitter or Facebook have signed with India to set up their operations. Now I hadn't heard that argument being made ever, and to me it was both odd (because CDA 230 is an American law, it surely cannot have any effect in India) and novel (what if there is someway this works, how cool would that be?). 

(8) I will link my article when it releases, it is a good introduction to the concept for non legal students as well. But basically BSD is a legal doctrine that says that there are certain parts of the constitution and certain values (such as secularism, equality, democracy, federalism, judicial review etc.) that form the essence of the constitution, and no parliament in its power to amend the constitution may amend the constitution after a certain point that it fundamentally alters the very basic identity of the constitution itself. And the main argument for putting this limitation is that the parliament itself derives its power to amend the constitution from the constitution. If the constitution (as interpreted in Kesavnanda Bharti case) itself gives a limited right to the parliament to amend the constitution, the parliament cannot take a way around to use that very limited amending power to give itself absolute amending power. 

(9) So one day I was watching an interview of Stripe CEO Patrick Collison on hiring and building culture at Stripe. (By the way Patrick is one of my favorite thinkers, check out the valuable things he has to say about a bunch of things here, here and here). And he mentioned this one particular issue that CEO's of large company face i.e. as and when these companies achieve scale and grow, the CEO by virtue of limited attention, time and cognition cannot be up to date with everything that is happening in the company and thus either cannot or is ill equipped to, take a lot of decisions. That to me was a very interesting point. Because it was similar to a concept called Hayek's knowledge problem. The knowledge problem is essentially a argument that says that central planning of an economy is bad and is almost always going to lead to unintended and unseen bad effects because critical information regarding complex and dynamic phenomenon such as economy lies fragmented with separate individuals. Thus there is no way for a central planner to acquire all of the knowledge required to make a half as intelligent decision regarding central production, allocation of resources, pricing etc. The argument is made in the context that it is better to let the free market drives the prices, supply and demand because it has a way to allocate the resources where they matter the most and where they are likely to have an overall net positive impact. See Shruti's related lecture on this topic here.

(10) The yes, and versus no, but approach outlines the difference in how you approach conversations. If you are the yes, and type - you are likely to engage in constructive debates and discussions because your aim is to add to the discussion and not to refute everyone else to emerge victorious. You want to avoid always being a no, but person. 

(11) I developed this rule only a few hours before writing this piece! This also tells you that I or anyone else hasn't figured out all the aspects of it yet. We're all learning to be better.