Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Do you curse our politicians for not having the will to frame laws to prevent and handle rape cases? Call me cynical, but at least that can be understood: our politicians know it’s a slippery slope. Make the system work against rape, and who knows? Maybe the system will start working against corruption next. Why risk all that? But that can’t be why the UK government is huffing and puffing against Google, Starbucks and Amazon. The Brits feel that those companies pay very little tax in the UK even though they make a considerable sum there. The best part? None of this is illegal; these companies just use (perfectly legal) ways to minimize taxes. And so the Brit government has gone crazy: they are demanding that such corporations pay more taxes than they are legally obligated to! Because that would be the “moral” thing to do! That is dumb at so many levels: -          Firstly, taxes are legal obligations (on all of us, not just corporations), not moral obligations. -       

I’ve always been happy that we engineers don’t have to get additional degrees beyond the B.E. or B.Tech., and that we don’t need to recertify ourselves periodically. 4 years of college and we are done. At the same time, I’ve felt sorry for doctors who (at least in the West) need to get themselves recertified periodically. My mom felt everyone does update themselves, even if it’s not always via a new degree. Surely, she said, all professionals read up new stuff and stay upto date, especially when their job demands it. Don’t engineers learn new programming languages and ways to speed up constructions, she asked? I think I found the answer when I read this Farnam Street analysis about the book, “ The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date ”, by Samuel Arbesman. Here’s the theme of that book: “Knowledge is like radioactivity. If you look at a single atom of uranium, whether it’s going to decay — breaking down and unleashing its energy — is highly unpre

Years back, I remember my dad asking why there are so many different tax rates and so many different exemption categories. (Yup, he was calculating his tax returns at that time; hence the frustration). I had gone into the standard reasons about why it is often a good thing to have those exemptions: after all, such exemptions often encourage investment in activities like infrastructure development. He had countered that it is equally often because of corporate pressure to provide loopholes to reduce their taxation. Which, of course, is true. But corporate driven tax reductions is not always a bad thing, as Ireland can tell you. Ireland’s corporate tax rate is lower than anywhere else in Europe. No wonder than that Google’s European headquarters is in Ireland! And it’s not just Google that Ireland attracted: plenty of other MNC’s go to Ireland for the same reason. That in turn translates to more investments in Ireland. And more jobs. That’s what Ireland calls a win-win. Then t

In moments of idealism, we often find ourselves wishing for a simpler/better/less-evil’er world. Or hear others say something similar and smirk. While in some cases, it is definitely a possibility, in others, it is good to step back and think of the practicality of what is being hoped for. The first kind is worth wishing for: If you wish for a cleaner alternative to, say, fossil fuels, it could happen. While difficult, no law of physics prevents such a technology from being developed. Even being cheaper than existing fuels eventually. It could happen. If not today, maybe tomorrow. Or the day after. But not impossible. The other kind of wishful thinking is what does deserve a smirk. The kind where people hope for things that would violate the laws of physics: like hoping for a perpetual motion machine to “fix” the energy problem. Or the kind, and this is more common among idealists, wishing for things like world peace. These are cases where hope is based on human nature chan

I read this article on something called “deliberate practice” and it was an eye-opener. Deliberate practice is very different from plain old practice. So what is plain old practice? Most people have been doing whatever they do for years or even decades. Yet most of them are not experts at their field, are they? So obviously, experience and repetition alone does not equal expertise. Ok, what then is deliberate practice? It has the following components: -          Activity is designed specifically to improve performance : the key word is “designed”. That means breaking the task into subparts and focusing on the subparts that you are not so good at. If you don’t focus on your weaknesses, you are unlikely to improve no matter how much you practice. On the other side, aim too high and you are likely to get frustrated and give up. The aim is to identify something beyond your reach, but only just. -          Feedback on results : This can be self-determined or by a peer, mentor or

My dad is hugely interested in physics. (He keeps telling me that he used to be interested, but not anymore. But that’s another story…). Unlike Rutherford who called other fields “stamp collecting”, my dad doesn’t have contempt for other fields. But I wonder whether even with his non-Rutherfordian worldview, my dad knew how totally unrelated fields drove physics even in the last century. Everyone can imagine how somewhat similar fields like chemistry could influence physics, but geology? Or paleontology (remember Ross from Friends ? The field of fossils and dinosaurs)? How could they possibly have pushed the boundaries of physics? But influence they did. It all started when people tried to compute the age of the earth a couple of centuries ago. As geologists started analyzing layers of rocks, they could not assign values to the ages of any of these layers since there was no known method to do so at that time. Then a renowned physicist got involved in the effort: Lord Kelvin

When I saw the news about how Saudi Arabia now sends text messages to the “male guardians” of women when they cross the border , I was very sure that Slashdot would have a fun trail on it…I could almost imagine the comments below it. And sure enough, there was . Now since the countries who pretend to care about human rights, the feminists who should care (by definition), and the secular folks whose tongues get tied when any evil is driven by religious edicts will, as expect, respond to such news with a deafening silence, we might as well laugh at it. After all, isn’t humour supposed the best medicine? The ball was set rolling with this comment/comparison: “When South Africa did this (to black people, rather than women), under Apartheid, the civilised world rightly condemned it, and imposed trade sanctions.” Which prompted the Steven Weinberg’ian response (he was the guy who said, “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing ev

I read this Scott Adams blog where he talked about how he kept forgetting to take his 5 items to the gym. Stuff like keys, iPod and so on. He wondered why his brain can’t seem to remember a simple list of 5 items? He never got around to answering that question because his blog focused on finding a way to remember, not why he couldn’t remember in the first place. So I will give it a shot instead: why is it that most of us can’t seem to remember such short lists when we can, at the same time, remember much more complex things? I feel the answer is that a checklist activity really has 2 parts to it: first, remembering the list; and secondly, finding and carrying each item on that list. I feel it is the time gap between the 2 parts which makes us forget. I am guessing we get bored by the time we perform the 3 rd part of the activity. Or maybe we don’t allocate time to do so many pairs of actions at the last minute! Oh, if you are interested, Adams’ solution to remembering suc

Arrogance: a word with a negative connotation. Humility: the opposite of arrogance, ergo a positive thing. Or so they would have you believe. I have never understood why people expect humility and make it sound like a good thing. Don’t get me wrong: I am not advocating arrogance. Rather, I am saying that sometimes the opposite of a bad thing is not necessarily a good thing either. After all, both are extremes (boastful and self-deprecation), so why don’t people advocate the middle ground instead? Surely a guy who is very good at something or did something great does not need to go around belittling his own achievements. And yet society almost demands humility from its members. No wonder Arthur Schopenhauer asked: “What is modesty but hypocritical humility, by means of which, in a world swelling with envy, a man seeks to obtain pardon for excellences and merits from those who have none?” Schopenhauer then went further and attributed a reason for why this is the case: “N

All of us know of people who can’t seem to accept reality. People who deny the facts. People who cling on to their delusions despite all the evidence. Usually when we think of such people, we mean the kind of people who still believe in creationism. But denial is not always that simple: it’s not always because people are dumb or crazy or religious. Sure, that’s mostly the reason but sometimes, just sometimes, it’s because the alternative is very scary. Even a vacuum at times. Or we feel the alternative puts us on a slippery slope to everything that we detest. These lines from Grey’s Anatomy give one such example from the world of surgeons: “Disappearances happen in science. Disease can suddenly fade away. Tumors go missing. We open someone up to discover the cancer is gone. It’s unexplained, it’s rare, but it happens. We call it misdiagnosis, say we never saw it in the first place, any explanation but the truth.” Of course, the smarter you are and the less you capable you

For the last so many 007 movies, I have felt that the movies were sucking all the fun out of the central character: if there were openings at Azkaban for dementors, the makers of the last few Bond movies would qualify automatically! The movies started frowning upon 007’s sexist nature: hello, that was part of the fun. Then they started including chicks with brains (think of Denise Richards as a nuclear scientist…or was it a rocket scientist?): c'mon, this is James Bond, you really want women's equality here? Then they started making the movies with a tragic undercurrent: Bond abandoned and left to suffer at the hand of the North Koreans; M authorizing taking a shot at the bad guy and hitting Bond instead; the one girl Bond cared about dies… And what the film makers couldn’t spoil, the collapse of the Soviet Union did: suddenly, the West could no longer call their enemies by that word (it was all complicated by the need for oil). And so we had to watch North Korean vi

Forgive and forget. We’ve all heard that advice/saying. I think part of the trouble with that advice is that it is conveyed in a manner which suggests that you are being the bigger person by forgiving and forgetting. But when you feel wronged about something or by someone, do you really give a damn about being the bigger person? If you are honest about it, retribution is what you truly seek. Or if it makes you feel better, you could use euphemisms like “justice”. These lines from the serial, Revenge , capture what most people feel perfectly: “For the truly wronged, real satisfaction can only be found in one of two places: absolute forgiveness or mortal vindication.” But even though most people feel that way, they never go down the Vendetta Highway for different reasons: first, there is no Monte Cristo fortune to free someone up to act without caring. In fact the opposite is almost always true: the person most probably still has to interact with the “enemy” because they share the

Ever heard of Jérôme Kerviel? He is the world’s indebted man: he owes, hold your breath, $6.3 billion. Nope, not a typo: that is indeed billion with a “b”. Wonder how someone can run up so much debt? Well, the guy was a trader for the French bank, Société Générale. Through a series of frauds, including hacked trading accounts, he bet way more of the bank’s money than they had ever authorized. And when his  bets went wrong, the bank lost $6.3 billion. And so the judge ruled that, after completing his 3 year jail term, Kerviel has to pay $6.3 billion to the bank as fines. What I found interesting was that the fine is so ridiculously unpayable that it effectively might as well have never been imposed. So why then did the judge impose it? Is the law really an ass? Not so, says Frank Partnoy, a former investment banker and current law professor. He explained the fine has two intents. First: “They'll likely reach some kind of agreement where a significant percentage of any money

This quote based on research by Dr.Carol Dweck got me thinking: “Children who are “entity theorists” … are prone to use language like ‘I am smart at this.’ And to attribute their success or failure to an ingrained and unalterable level of ability. They see their overall intelligence or skill level at a certain discipline to be a fixed entity, a thing that cannot evolve. Incremental theorists, who have picked up a different modality of learning, are more prone to describe their results with sentences like ‘I got it because I worked very hard at it’ or ‘I should have tried harder.’ A child with a learning theory of intelligence tends to sense that with hard work, difficult material can be grasped- step-by-step, incrementally, the novice can become the master.” Many of us think (or like to think) that smart people are born that way. That it is a gift. Guess what? Even the Beatles practiced for more than 10,000 hours at night clubs (as per the book, Outliers: The Story of Success );

Before I start, let me state that this blog isn’t to justify or encourage lieing. That said, let me proceed. When disgusted with the repeated deception and lies of certain people, many people often wonder whether that bunch totally lacks any sense of right and wrong. But let’s face it: most people aren’t that amoral or immoral. So why then do they still lie? Part of the answer is in these lines from Grey’s Anatomy : “No matter how hard we try to ignore or deny it, eventually the lies fall away, whether we like it or not. But here’s the truth about the truth: It hurts. So we lie.” That’s certainly true: faced with the choice between doing what’s right and what’s easy, people often take the easy way. Now step back and you’ll notice that the phrase doesn’t say “what’s right and what’s wrong ”, instead it says “what’s right and what’s easy ”. And that is the key: very few say to themselves, “I am going to lie”. Usually, they’re taking the easy way out when they lie. So

There’s that famous saying about those who never learn from history. But is it even possible to learn from history? Or is it an impossible goal altogether? Part of it has, of course, to do with ego. Who really thinks that they are embarking on a course of action that has already been attempted, and failed at, for the exact same reasons? Also known as the I-am-smarter-I-am-stronger feeling. Besides, just because the last guy got burnt at something doesn’t mean the next guy can’t succeed at it, right? Then there’s the difference between history and science. Or to put it differently, life isn’t a lab experiment, and no two situations are exactly the same. As Michael Mauboussin pointed out: “The challenge with history, however, is that it’s a very fickle teacher. Which is a lot of the key to understanding history is what the circumstances were.” Assessing the circumstances is a subjective choice; you can either willfully ignore things based on your view or often, not even be

Lots of people in India seem to care about the digits on their license plates. So much so that the license issuing authorities decided to make money out of it: put up the most sought after numbers (like 001) for auction. And they don’t make peanuts out of the process: the bids often run into tens of lakhs of rupees! That’s more than the cost of many vehicles! And superstitions exist across cultures, across races, across regions. So why are people so irrational? Did Grey’s Anatomy get it right? “Superstition lies in the space between what we can control and what we can’t. Find a penny, pick it up, and all day long you’ll have good luck. No one wants to pass up a chance for good luck. But does saying it thirty three times really help? Is anyone really listening? And if no one’s listening, why do we bother doing those strange things at all? We rely on superstitions because we’re smart enough to know we don’t have all the answers. And that life works in mysterious ways. Don’t

“What would you do if today is your last day on earth?” This is a question meant to make you do things you always wanted to but always keep pushing back for later. To appreciate the people you care about. To tell people how you feel. To stop and smell the roses. To do all those things now instead of regretting not having done them later . But going too far with that mindset makes you seek instant gratification. To not think of the long term consequences. To burn money today without thinking of retirement tomorrow. Finding that golden mean (as always) is the hard thing to do. Worse, often, you can know the right choice only with hindsight! As Edward de Bono wrote: “It may necessary to be on the top of a mountain in order to find the best way up.” Unfortunately, by then, you are already on top of the mountain, so you don’t care about the best way up anymore. Or you can’t climb that mountain again. Because, unless you are James Bond, you only live once.

There’s always been so much hype around those college dropouts who go on to become billionaires: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, the list in the field of technology is endless. Well, ok, it only happens in America, but still… I thought that the reason for this was the following: a guy without a degree can’t get a regular job. That would force him to take a chance on building his own company. And among the many, many such attempts, a microscopic few would become mega-successful. And famous. And (mis)quoted and twisted out of shape to state that the way to riches is to drop out of college! I still think I am right in my reasoning. But after reading these lines in the article, “The No. 1 Enemy of Creativity: Fear of Failure”, I think there is another reason as well: “…if your internalized view of failure is anything that is not perfect, then you are disempowering yourself from exercising your inherent creativity. You're certainly not the only one shackled by t

“If you ask them ( surgeons ), they’ll tell you they’re going to be general surgeons, orthopedic surgeons, neurosurgeons. Distinctions which do more than describe their areas of expertise, they help define who they are, because outside the operating room, not only do most surgeons have no idea who they are, they’re afraid to find out.” -          from Grey’s Anatomy That is true about so many people: their job defines their identity (in their own minds). The better they are at their job, the more likely they are to feel this way. Because then their profession brings in the complements and respect. And who doesn’t like those? After all, it is such a sharp contrast to their spouse or kid or neighbor who barely notice what they do. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself: when was the last time you complemented your spouse? Nor do they respect you (why would they? Your skills usually have no relevance outside the workplace). The problem with this way of life is that retirement hits su

It has been very long since I came across a passage that I so totally disagreed with, lines that I felt were as completely wrong on every front of this. The lines in question are from Jaron Lanier’s book,   You Are Not A Gadget : “Wikipedia, for instance, works on what I call the Oracle illusion, in which knowledge of the human authorship of a text is suppressed in order to give the text superhuman validity. Traditional holy books work in precisely the same way and present many of the same problems.” So what do I find wrong in that? Hmmm, let’s see… Holy books don’t hide their author? Really? What has this guy been drinking? All holy books derive their “truth” by claiming to come from God or some guy who claims to have seen, felt or experienced God. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is by humans, for humans and of humans. The Wikipedia philosophy of making it not-so-obvious as to who wrote what encourages you to believe or question something based on your assessment of it

Technology, specifically technologies related to the Internet, have disrupted fields like journalism (think of how Twitter and YouTube have given a whole new meaning to the term “breaking news”) and publishing (everyone can blog or post a review or a comment; you don’t need access to a printing press). So is education the next port of call for the technology juggernaut? It sure would appear so given how many American universities have started offering free online courses. And we are talking about the top ones here, like Harvard and MIT. But is there any downside to online education? Apart from the obvious, and very important, point that most of these online courses do not award degrees (No degree, no job).  I read this article that pointed several good reasons why online education cannot replace conventional in-the-classroom education. Education is not (should not be?) about ramming facts into your head: “Education is not the transmission of information or ideas. Educ

A while back I had written a blog on how Sherlock Holmes felt so outdated and ancient. Back then, one of my cousins had suggested that I watch this modern day version of Holmes and see how good the detective could still be. Unfortunately,  I never got to watch that because the baby would still be awake at the time the serial came, which meant no TV watching. But now the baby’s sleeping schedule has changed, and (good for me) a re-run of that Holmes serial just started (it comes on BBC Entertainment and is called Sherlock ). So finally I get to see it and boy, was my cousin right! It is very good indeed. Better yet, they are not just showing the original stories in a modern setting (I never liked adaptations), instead they create new stories, a Dr Watson with some spunk, an inspector who isn't fawning over Holmes and modern day gadgets that help with the case. Same behavior in a different era often creates unintended humour. Like the restaurant owner who assumes Holmes an

When you are a kid (school kid or college kid), you look at different professions from a certain perspective, a kid’s perspective. And since most of us never have a chance to talk things out with a real (let alone good) career counselor, we end up making choices without fully understanding what life in that profession will be like. Which is almost tragic, given that the choice impacts the rest of your adult life. So I wonder why career counseling isn’t more into telling kids what a profession is like. Like telling them an engineering degree is valid across countries. Or that people skills are critical to being a doctor, not just being good at academics. Or that a medical degree isn’t valid across countries, and even requires periodic re-certification if they plan to go settle in the West. Or that a lawyer’s life is tough (in India) unless you have family or other connections in that field already. Or that an MBA in marketing would create lots of travel (not all to glamorous are

Periodically they have these sales exhibitions at the clubhouse in my apartment complex. And my wife will usually drop in and see what they have for sale on her way to the gym. When she liked something that she wanted to buy, she will almost always call me to come down with cash or a card. I initially wondered why she didn’t carry the cash on her? Then I realized it must be because she doesn’t want to be having things to carry when going to the gym. But then the same thing continued to happen even when she took her mom for these sales! That didn’t make sense: surely, her mother could carry some cash, I thought. I think I have finally stumbled upon the reason for this insanity: it must be one of those Hamlet things (“Though this be madness, yet there is method in it”). I am sure you got the madness part, so what is the method in it? Ta da ! My wife is one of those rare women who doesn’t like to spend money. Except on the kid. She doesn’t carry cash or card because that wa

In one of my recent blogs on logarithmic thinking , I had pointed out how research indicated that people who did not know the concept of numbers (like some tribes) and kids who had not yet been taught numbers at school think of numbers in relative terms, as ratios, and not in absolute terms. At that time, I thought the rest of us who have been taught numbers think in absolute terms, not logarithmically (not in ratios). I realized I was wrong when I was reading Dan Ariely’s blog on diminishing sensitivity. Diminishing what, you ask? Well, think of how you argue with the subzi wallah when he charges Rs.10 more than earlier times. But you don’t get all worked up if that expensive restaurant down the road increases the price of their dishes by Rs.10. Ariely’s point is that it is the same Rs.10 in both cases: so why do you not care equally in both cases? The answer is diminishing sensitivity: you don’t look at Rs.10, the absolute number. Instead you compare Rs.10 with the price

Most kids complain about how boring and/or meaningless most of the stuff they are taught at school is. There are the usual and well known reasons: teachers who barely know the subject, another set that doesn’t really care about the subject or the students, text books that are totally useless etc etc. Things don’t improve when you go to college either: apart from the above reasons, many lecturers/professors teaching professional courses resent the fact that their students will start with higher salaries than they make after years of experience. Is there any hope of improving things at either end then? Or is the only way (at least theoretically) to increase teacher salaries? Even if that were possible (which it isn’t anyway, because parents will be up in arms if school fees are raised), I realized that kids would still feel school is boring and/or useless when I read these lines by Roger Schank:  “I was a pretty good teacher if I do, say so myself (and many of my students say exactly

Bring up the word “logarithmic” and I am guessing it brings back painful memories of highly complicated rules on how multiply or divide. To make matters worse, logarithms never seemed to get used in real life in an area that any of us cares about. Other than the Richter scale that is used to measure earthquakes, that is. And yet, counter-intuitively, it turns out that instinctively we humans are programmed to look at numbers logarithmically, not linearly! And how do we know this? The discovery happened when scientists examined how South American Munduruku Indians visualized numbers spread on a line. This seems like a no-brainer at first: after all, which one of us doesn’t think of numbers as being spread evenly across a number line (think of graphs, house numbers etc)? But stop and think a bit and you realize that’s only because of how we were taught at school. Now these Munduruku Indians, they don’t even have the concept of numbers. So the scientists devised an experiment where the