Viswanathan K's Thoughts

We are often put off by the jargon others use (if we don’t understand it). But when we use the jargon of the field we understand, we don’t even realize it! Now don’t get me wrong. I fully understand the advantage of jargon: it saves us the time of having to explain every concept that we refer to in our discussions. But I didn’t realize that the very same jargon can, at times, prevent us from knowing the extent of our ignorance about things! That fact hit me while reading this passage from Richard Feynman’s The Pleasure of Finding Things Out where he talked about his dad’s way of teaching things: “Looking at a bird he says, “Do you know what that bird is? It’s a brown throated thrush; but in Portuguese it’s a . . . in Italian a . . . ,” he says “in Chinese it’s a . . . , in Japanese a . . . ,” etcetera. Now,” he says, “you know in all the languages you want to know what the name of that bird is and when you’ve finished with all that,” he says, “ you’ll know  absolutely n...

Edward Frenkel, a mathematics professor at Berkeley, agrees fully with the US Supreme Court ruling on this topic: “A scientific truth, or the mathematical expression of it, is not a patentable invention.” Additionally, he also feels that: “This inherent democracy has always been the mark of mathematics: It belongs to us all, even if people are not aware of it.” That is why he is so incensed with the notorious NSA (the US agency that was revealed to be spying on pretty much everyone) for intentionally undermining encryption algorithms used world over. (After all, if they can’t decrypt, how can they spy?) Parts of our Internet communication are encrypted (which is why we are willing to enter our card details on the Net). Frenkel tell us that many cryptosystems are based on sophisticated mathematical objects called “elliptic curves” (don’t worry: we don’t need to know anything other the term itself for this blog). But here’s the catch: “It turns out that there are some ...

Adam Smith once wrote that wonder arises “when something quite new and singular is presented… [and] memory cannot, from all its stores, cast up any image that nearly resembles this strange appearance”. But is Smith right? Or does what James T. Mangan say in his book, You Can Do Anything! sound closer to the truth? “Any normal child, at about the age of three or four, reaches the asking period, the time when that quickly developing brain is most eager for knowledge. “When?” “Where?” “How?” “What?” and “Why?” begs the child — but all too often the reply is “Keep still!” “Leave me alone!” “Don’t be a pest!” Those first bitter refusals to our honest questions of childhood all too often squelch our “Asking faculty.” We grow up to be men and women, still eager for knowledge, but afraid and ashamed to ask in order to get it.” I feel that while what Mangan says is definitely true, it’s only part of the reason we stop asking questions as adults. In many cases, Jesse Prinz po...

Facebook recently announced two separate expansions to its ad network: 1)       One is called Atlas, by which advertisers can use Facebook’s extensive knowledge of individuals to place better ads on other websites. 2)      The other scheme is called Audience Network and is only meant for mobile devices. If an advertiser buys an ad on Facebook, then Facebook will display those ads not only the Facebook app itself but also inside other apps on your phone. Ellis Hamburger describes it nicely: brace yourselves for a world where “the ads you see inside your apps might get creepier or “more relevant””. Now before you bring out your torches and pitchforks and burn Facebook at the stake, consider why exactly you are so horrified. Since Facebook is free to its users, surely they need to make money in some way, right? How many would join a paid social network that promised that it wouldn’t track and sell data about you? That alternati...

Through school (and college), we learn that figuring out the answer (or guessing it) alone wasn’t good enough: it had to be arrived at by following the correct steps. The only exception to this is while answering multiple choice questions. Richard Feynman described his experience in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out when he saw his cousin trying to solve algebraic equations: “ He says, “What do you know–2x + 7 is equal to 15,” he says “and you’re trying to find out what x is.” I say, “You mean 4.” He says, “Yeah, but you did it with arithmetic, you have to do it by algebra.” His cousin was saying how you arrived at the answer mattered as much as the answer itself. Feynman did not buy that point: “ The whole idea was to find out what x was and it didn’t make any difference how you did it–there’s no such thing as, you know, you do it by arithmetic, you do it by algebra.” But aren’t there certain advantages to knowing a technique to get to the answer? Like when the answe...

When someone forms snap judgments of people based on appearance, we know it’s a lot worse than judging a book by its cover. Someone (nick)named Happy on some site made an interesting point on this topic: “Stereotypes are wrong of course. But brands are good.” An interesting question: are stereotypes and brands two sides of the same coin? Happy goes on to say that when people dress a certain way, willy nilly, “they are creating a brand for themselves”: “There's a nerd brand. There's a metro-sexual brand. There's a jock brand, a cheerleader brand, a gothic brand…a gangster brand.” The next step in Happy’s argument is what makes this topic so interesting. When people see someone looking or behaving a certain way, they apply the duck test : “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” Now given that everyone knows this is how most people think, then Happy tells people who (deliberately) project a certain i...

When it comes to hosting the FIFA (football) World Cup, countries are usually falling over themselves to own, as per this article by Ravi Dev , the white elephant. Hosting a World Cup is very expensive. For not so rich countries, the sums involved are enough “to completely transform a (host) country’s political and economic agenda”! Take “Brazil’s over-budget World Cup”, says Dev: it’s estimated to cost more than $13.5 billion, the most expensive World Cup till date. Now consider that Brazil is similar to India in terms of how well off it is, and you’d wonder whether that money would have been better spent on, I don’t know, roads or hospitals or schools? Or consider the weird case of selecting Qatar as the venue for 2022. The estimates there would blow you away: $200 billion! Why the astronomical sum, you wonder? The venue for the final, Lusail, is a city that is yet to be built! No, not a typo: the city is going to be built for the World Cup and will cost $45 billion. Why FI...

Naomi Klein says that capitalism cannot be the solution to the problem of climate change: “If we really believed that climate change is an existential crisis, if we believed climate change is a weapon of mass destruction, as John Kerry said, why on Earth would you leave it to the vagaries of the market?” Klein clarifies that she is not saying that “the market has no role”. While agreeing that there will be “solar and wind millionaires”, she says that a solution to climate change requires major changes that can only be achieved via “a strong role for the public sector, a strong role for regulations and, yes, incentives”. Klein’s approach sounds like a (much) stronger version of the approach Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein described in their book, Nudge . Jeremy Waldron describes the book thus:  “Some (choices) make themselves clamorously known; others have to be unearthed…There is no getting away from this: choices are always going to be structured in some manner, w...

In Thinking, Fast and Slow , Daniel Kahneman has this to say about “outcome bias”: “We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly.” He says we forget that what appears obvious with hindsight “was written in invisible ink that became legible only after the event.” That part of the invisible ink, Nassim Taleb (of The Black Swan fame) would dismiss as “narrative fallacy”: our inability to attribute things to luck (or randomness); which in turn makes us come up with well defined reasons, events and choices behind whatever it is we saw happen. (On a related note, maybe this is why we never learn from history? Does narrative fallacy do exactly what Taleb warns about: “It severely distorts our mental representation of the world”?) Most of us, in our rational moments, think that we should value process over results. Because we believe that over time, the luck aspect will even out, and the better process will triumph more often. Here’s the ...