Viswanathan K's Thoughts

A few weeks back, I wrote about the parameters based on which I felt that we, the middle class, should evaluate demonetization . As the self-imposed 50 day deadline approaches, it’s clear that the daily limits on currency withdrawal aren’t going away in that timeframe. Nor are the smaller denominations of currency going to be available easily. So where is the outrage? Why aren’t there protests yet? Why isn’t the opposition able to capitalize on this so far? I can think of a couple of reasons: -          The majority still feel this is a necessary move to tackle black money. After 60 years of complaining about the evil, most people feel that the pain caused by demonetization can be tolerated for some more time if the ultimate goal is achieved. That hope still remains in many people. -          Shadenfreude: meaning “to take spiteful, malicious delight in the misfortune of others”. Many derive pleasu...

We know that America is a very litigious society: people sue for the most idiotic of reasons. And win! Remember that night club shooting in Florida recently? Guess who some of the victims are suing? Google, Twitter and Facebook. On what grounds, you wonder : “The lawsuit is the latest to target popular Internet services for making it too easy for the Islamic State to spread its message.” Wow! Who’s next by this logic: telephone line companies and mobile manufacturers? No wonder we find so many warnings and disclaimers on pretty much any product we buy: it’s all rooted in idiotic lawsuits like the one mentioned above. Ironically, those very warnings in products could then trigger the nocebo effect. What’s that? It’s the opposite of the famous placebo effect (a beneficial effect produced not by the medicine or treatment, but due to the patient's belief in that treatment!). From Shelley Adler’s book, Sleep Paralysis : “(Doctors) have found that pretending to expose peo...

A long time back, I remember being amused by this Calvin and Hobbes strip: Fast forward to present day: I am at the receiving end of such updates from my daughter! Some might say things are actually worse today; that we are subject to a similar barrage of updates from not just our kids but also our friends on Facebook and WhatsApp. But here’s the difference: at least those can be ignored. Or just for revenge, even liked without reading! Now try doing that with your kid: well ok, it might work for some time until, that is, they catch on. And then will come a day when you want to hear from them and they just won’t bother...

Almost everyone who has a smartphone is, what Jeremy Vandehey calls a “mobile junkie” : “The phosphorescent glow left me mesmerized and needing more.” Don't think you are a junkie? Then try the Vandehey test: “When is the last time you powered down. All the way down. Not asleep. Not in airplane mode but ON | OFF. Try it with me now. Take your phone out, if you’re not already futzing with it, and turn it off...Fair warning, you will experience a short stint of anxiety and emptiness.” But what's wrong with being a mobile junkie? After all: “The reality is 95% of each day is boring, everyday life...We’ve trained ourselves to constantly seek refuge from boring, everyday life through our phones.” True, but how about the other 5%? But first, consider what Calvin said when he viewed this spectacularly beautiful sunrise? Now think of how we treat the same experience today? “I ‘witnessed’ a beautiful sunset. As I was reminiscing over the dozens of photos I took, I...

In recent times, a large number of hit novels have the word “Girl” in their title. The Girl on the Train . Gone Girl . Razor Girl . Stieg Larsson’s series starting with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo . There are many others. Emily St. John Mandel did a data analysis of this trend (apparently looking into the “girl” trend is a bit of a trend in itself!). The article has charts and everything else you’d expect when someone crunches the numbers! But the part that really caught my attention was these lines: “Why are there so many of these books? Well, because publishing is an industry ruled by mystery and chance… Because there is a certain element of mystery to the whole thing, when a book does explode, there’s a natural tendency to try to copy elements of its success. ” So if the word “Girl” shows up disproportionately in the titles of hit books, no prizes for guessing what’s going to happen to the next set of books. Until this one stops “working”. Or they find the next patter...

As the cash crunch in ATM’s and banks continued, Modi’s reasons for demonetization kept changing. Initially, it was about black money; then about counterfeiting; and then it was about going cashless. Did it sound like he was cooking up a new reason each time? Or take the (alleged) Russian hacking of the recent US Presidential election. Did Putin & Co do that to help Trump win? Or did they do it as revenge against Hillary who, in 2011, accused Putin of rigging the Russian election? The US media finds a new reason each time… Or how about Nitish Kumar’s support for demonetization? Did he genuinely mean it? Or was it a signal to the electorate that he too is against corruption? Or was it a signal to the BJP that he is not averse to joining forces with them, if mutually acceptable terms are worked out? We tend to believe that politicians can’t have multiple reasons for their policies, actions and statements. What if that were not true, at least for the ones at or near the ...

Eugenics had many advocates: the Americans practiced forced sterilization of the “dumb” ones; Winston Churchill supported it; Scandinavian countries passed laws on compulsory sterilization. Others supported sterilization of those with heritable diseases, even though the understanding of which diseases were heritable was pathetic back then. The view on eugenics didn’t change for a long time, as Philippa Levine, said in a Five Books interview : “It doesn’t really become a dirty word until the Nazis get involved.” After which, everyone else insisted, “No, no, no, we’re nothing like the Nazis.” Indira Gandhi’s sterilization drive was part-coercive, part-incentive driven. But all that was “your Nazi grandfather’s eugenics”, to quote Siddhartha Mukherjee from The Gene . Levine points out that there is also “Latin eugenics”, as practiced in South America, Spain and Italy: “It is generally what we call ‘positive’ eugenics, which — rather than stopping people from having children — ...

My mom commented on the title and tone of Barbara Tuchman’s wonderful book, The March of Folly , that it was so different to see a history book that was judgmental rather than just narrative. And that reminded me why I loved Freedom at Midnight : it too had strong views on the main characters and the events that played out leading to India’s freedom and partition. Both books made me realize that judgmental history is so much interesting than the one we’re taught history at school, what tech blogger Venkatesh Rao describes as “an extremely dull, non-analytical version of history which is just one damned fact after another”. Of course, judgmental history is a double-edged sword, as Rao warns: “In countries like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, it might be much more deliberately political.” So I think that it’s better for schools to teach it the way they do in liberal democracies like the West and India (“it’s a bit more open” most of the time, even if it too inevitably “serves c...

Kids have this habit of asking “Why?” about everything. Like all parents, I’ve experienced different emotions when that happens: -          It’s flattering because you know the answer; -          Enjoying the experience of phrasing the explanation in a way that the kid gets it; -          It sets off a hope that you’ve done your bit to encourage the kid to stay curious and seek (and hopefully understand) explanations; -          It shames me that I don’t know something so basic; -          And of course, at times it can be highly irritating. One time, my 5 year old daughter asked me yet another Why question and I replied, “It’s too complicated to explain to you”. Upon which, she said, “But you’ve simplified other things in the past; so why can’t you to do it for this too?” I w...

I have held myself back from writing a blog on demonetization all this while feeling stating the short term problems it created was, well, just stating the obvious. On the other hand, the question of whether the move would yield long term benefits, well, couldn’t be evaluated until much later anyway. But the slew of left leaning/ what-has-it-done-to-the-poor articles forces me to write… I am not the least bit sympathetic with the middle class (or rich) folks who criticize demonetization by pointing out the problems it has created for the poor. It’s time we, the middle class, got selfish, and said that we’re going to evaluate demonetization and what it does for (to?) us: -          Does it create nightmarishly long waits to get small amounts of money? Obviously. -          Do people like us have alternate ways of paying for almost everything other than our maids, the newspaper guy and their likes? A...

When thinking of the increasing frequency with which pollsters fail to predict election outcomes (Modi in 2014, Kejriwal sweep of Delhi, Brexit, Trump), I’ve wondered whether the issue might be that no pollster wants to announce a radically -different-from-all-the-rest prediction. Does he feel it’s better to fail with the pack than to fail by being the outlier? If he fails with the pack, at least he can say, “Hey, nobody else got it either”. But is that what is really happening? Or is the problem that pollsters don’t bring out a fairly obvious point made by Elroy Dimson as part of their predictions: “Risk means more things can happen than will happen.” Put differently, it means that you can only assign probabilities to your predictions; almost nothing is a certainty. Since that’s obviously true, shouldn’t the pollster not just say that he believes that X will win, but also what his confidence in that prediction is? Nate Silver is a guy who has been assigning probabilitie...

While chatting with one of my cousins from the journalistic world on the topic of fake news, I realized that both traditional media companies/sites and tech sites each see only parts of the problem, tend to badmouth the other side indiscriminately, and believe in impossible/impractical solutions because they don’t understand the first thing about the other side! First, not everyone gets a key difference between a tech company like Facebook and a “biased” media house. Fox News, for example, would only be watched by right wing folks in the US while New York Times would only be read by left leaning folks. Facebook, on the other hand, can feed both sets of folks exactly the news they already like. Is it a surprise that the world is moving to the site that follows the “Give the people what they like” approach for their news? Next, let Scottie Nell Hughes, one of Trump’s spokespeople, take the point that most news media is biased (left or right) to its logical consequence : “Tha...

A couple of years back, I wrote about the complaint of people drowning in the endless stream of information that is available online. Clay Shirky’s response (“It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”) from 2008 made perfect sense to me. Recently, I stumbled upon Nick Carr’s argument that Shirky only got it backwards. The reason many feel swamped is, as per Carr? “It’s not information overload. It’s filter success.” The exact opposite of what Shirky said! And it sounds completely wrong. And so Carr elaborates. Carr points out there are 2 types of information overload: 1)       Situational overload (“You need a particular piece of information…and that piece of information is buried in a bunch of other pieces of information.”) 2)      Ambient overload (“We’re surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the neverending pressure of trying to keep up with it all.”...

Did you feel sad when Pluto got demoted from its status as a planet to a dwarf planet? The debate around that is because the classification is arbitrary: how spherical does an object have to be to be called a planet? How big must be it compared to other objects in orbit at the same distance? Why those values? None of these answers can be derived from the laws of physics, hence the controversy. Ok, but the difference between a planet and a star? Surely, that’s easy, right? A star emits its own light whereas a planet doesn’t. Simple? Even when a star runs out of fuel, we don’t call it a planet. Until we found the “diamond planet”, that is! Huh? Long, long ago, there was this pulsar. Oversimplified, a pulsar is a star that has collapsed and is spinning really fast. Like 170 times a second. As it spins, the pulsar shoots out deadly radiation. How deadly? Suffice to say, it’d make our nukes feel puny by comparison. There was this other star that got too close to this pul...

There are lots of claims that circulation of fake news tilted the scales in favour of Trump. How exactly, you wonder: 1)       Most people don’t bother reading/watching any news; and their sole source of news is whatever their Facebook feed shows them. 2)      Facebook didn’t (couldn’t?) filter out the fake news; and (as always) just kept pumping whatever users tended to click on. 3)      Thus the fake news barrage hit those who were inclined to believe in it; and the volume eventually convinced them it must be true. Nick Carr points out that how quickly things have changed: “Once upon a time — not so long ago, really — there was something called the mainstream media, and it employed lots of journalists and editors and fact-checkers to filter the news. We came to resent these “gatekeepers,” as we took to calling them, because they restricted what we read and saw. They were self-interested elites who… im...

Newton and gravity; Einstein and relativity; Darwin and evolution: everyone knows the theories associated with those scientists. But Richard Feynman? Most (lay) people wouldn’t know anything about what he contributed to science. And yet Feynman continues to be rock star famous. Why? Shane Parrish gets the reason for that perfectly: “Why is Feynman so well known? It’s likely because he had tremendous range  outside  of pure science, and although he won a Nobel Prize for his work in quantum mechanics, he’s probably best known for other things, primarily his  wonderful ability to explain  and teach.” As Bill Gates puts it: “He takes such obvious delight in knowledge—you can see his face light up. And he makes it so clear that anyone can understand it.” It’s not as if Feynman is good at explaining things only to laymen. Even physics students at college used to be blown away. As Leonard Susskind wrote in Black Hole Wars : “Everyone else wo...

Why the Internet was created is well known: back in the Cold War era, the American military was terrified at the prospect of the USSR launching simultaneous nuclear attacks on the HQ’s of all the American military installations, thereby knocking out the ability of the US to retaliate. Thinking in the capitalists’ way, the US decided to create a network that was completely decentralized . Knocking out an entire network that was decentralized was considered impossible. At least some parts would survive the Soviet attack; and they would retaliate. Recently, a massive attack took down many popular Internet sites (Amazon, Twitter, Netflix etc) in almost the entire US . Brian Krebs writes : “(It now emerges that the attack was) launched with the help of hacked “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices, such as CCTV video cameras and digital video recorders.” How the attack works using such network enabled devices is scary: “(It) scours the Web for IoT devices protected by littl...

When the Volkswagen emission scandal broke out last year, it brought out the dangers of more and more software being put in the good old automobile. But that was a case of deliberately writing software to fool the emission test. Then there’s Tesla, the company that made electric cars sexy, not just a car for those who care about the environment. How extensively its cars use software can be best described by these lines from Ashlee Vance’s book : “While the owner slept, Tesla’s engineers tapped into the car via the Internet connection and downloaded software updates. When the customer took the car out for a spin in the morning and found it working right, he was left feeling as if magical elves had done the work.” Or as Bruce Schneier wrote: “A modern car isn't an automobile with a computer in it. It's a computer with four wheels and an engine.” It does sound like magic, right? Until the software gets hacked, that is. Then we realize Paul Sherwood’s point on ...

In his blog on consumerism, Santosh Desai compared today’s scenario where: “The next big thing is awaited with anticipation, and gets absorbed into our lives virtually instantly, without creating a sense of satisfaction.” With the consumerism of our childhood, an era when: “Things lived twice over, once as yawning absences and then as presences that were made to linger, till every last drop of juice was extracted from it.” That sentiment isn’t all that uncommon. But what if consumerism is a good thing? A must have for the prosperity of all? Yuval Noah Harari’s awesome book Sapiens certainly seems to say so: Part 1: Origin of Capitalism : -          Long ago, money, that astounding thing that can “convert anything into almost anything else”, had a severe constraint: it could “convert only things that actually existed in the present”. -          And so “people agreed to represent imaginary ...