Viswanathan K's Thoughts

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 exac...

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...

Michael Lewis, author of books like Liar’s Poker , profiled Obama recently and I found the part about Obama’s comments on making decisions all the time was interesting. So many people complain about having too many choices, too many decisions to make, so how does Obama deal with it? After all, his decisions have far bigger impact than what most people do. One of the things Obama does is to cut down on personal decisions. Like what to wear or what to eat. Why does he do that? “Because I have too many other decisions to make”! So if he’s making that many other decisions, then why not also decide what to eat or how to dress? Apparently, Obama believes in research that found the act of making a decision degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. So he felt he should conserve his decision making for the important things only. Now combine the fact that his job is to make decisions, and he doesn’t want to “waste” that on trivial things: how does he achieve it? By routinizing himself...

I’ve never heard negative things about charisma. Sure, you will sometimes hear criticism about people “misusing” their charisma to push through their agendas but that’s really an objection against how a person uses (or abuses) his charisma, not against charisma itself. With the US elections drawing near and the endless coverage of their parties’ conventions, I got to see 2 instances of charismatic people, one from each party, almost being a liability to their respective candidates! The first guy was some senator, Marco Rubio, who was asked to speak in support of his party’s candidate, Mitt Romney. I don’t follow it yet, but I heard that Romney is like the exact opposite of charismatic. Rubio, again a guy I had never heard of (but got to see during a Jon Stewart interview), is the exact opposite. No wonder then that Stewart jokingly asked Rubio if his party bosses had told him to be careful when he went on-stage to endorse Romney. The exact phrase Stewart used was: “Hey, Charisma Boy...

When Neil Armstrong & team were getting ready for their moonshot, they found it next to impossible to get life insurance. Either the companies refused outright to issue such a policy or the premiums were ridiculously large. Which made sense: how many people really thought they could make the trip and come back in one (live) piece? In fact, even the US government had a letter ready to be read out just in case the astronauts got stranded on the moon! Check it out: So you can’t really blame the insurance companies this time, can you? Then again, the astronauts still wanted their loved ones to get some money in case they died. But was there a solution? Turns out Armstrong wasn’t just a good astronaut, aerospace engineer and pilot: he was also good about money matters. He figured a way out to make sure his family would be taken care if things went wrong. So what was his solution? They signed  hundreds of autographs on envelopes in the quarantine month leading to their take off...

At the workplace (or at least in the software industry), we see endless checklists. Most of these checklists are useless, or even worse than useless: they just delay things without adding any value. Why then do we still have these checklists? Good old bureaucracy, I thought. Which reminded me of this tirade by Bill Bonner against bureaucracy: “But you don't really think bureaucrats could improve the quality of teaching, do you? Of course not. What do they know about teaching? Or agriculture? Or selling stocks? Or banking? Or anything else? What improvements have bureaucrats ever made? Name one! Who invented indoor plumbing? Who invented the repeating rifle or rolled the first cigarette? Who created Facebook? Bureaucrats do not create wealth. They transfer it. From the people who earned it to themselves and other zombies.” But if checklists are just bureaucracy, why then do survive in the corporate world? Surely the profit motive should eliminate these inefficiencies, right? Gues...