Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Donald Trump. Mocked, loved or reviled; but he is not ignored. Based on his statements, one of the very many jokes going around is his “world view”: Ok, now that you’ve had your laugh, let’s get a bit more serious. We like to think of ourselves as balanced, open to arguments and willing to change our mind. But how many of us go as far as what Charlie Munger told: “I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.” Do you “know the other side’s argument better than they do” on a topic like Trump? And no, answers like “What’s to know? His supporters are lunatics or racists” don’t count. When he is winning state after state, do you really believe that 35-50% of the US suddenly became that way in the last 6 months? Really? So if you can’t come up reasons why he may be so popular, let’s go over Scott Adams’ attempt to “know the other side’s argument better than they do”: 1)     ...

Here is an example of the typical hypocrisy of the left leaning media, this one from a Deccan Herald editorial : “Finance minister Arun Jaitley said that freedom of expression does not give anyone the right to call for the country’s destruction. It is a wrong and mischievous statement, meant to lower the value and importance of a basic constitutional right by positioning it against the survival of the “country.”… Freedom of expression is more important than the idea of nationalism that Jaitley and other leaders are championing and propagating.” It is news to me that we value freedom of expression in this country! Let me cite a few instances across decades, across political parties, across religions: 1)       Hounding of MF Hussain for painting a Hindu goddess nude; 2)      Arresting a couple of girls who criticized Bal Thackeray during his funeral procession… on Facebook! 3)      Banning of Satanic Verses ; ...

I’ll start off by pointing out that I sympathize with the regular people who lost family and friends in the Brussels attacks. That said, I do not sympathize in the least with the European government policies that have led to this. Hillary Clinton once told Pakistan that if they kept snakes in their backyard, the snakes would eventually attack them. She could say the same thing to Europe today. Belgium has called out its military on the streets of Brussels, once in November and now again. But what other actions do you see that you’d expect from a country that appears to face a major threat? None whatsoever. Further, most jihadists are Belgian citizens; so constitutional protections apply to them! Thus, Belgium’s hands are tied severely even though it contributes more jihadists relative to its population than any other European country. It can’t do much even about the known returned jihadists, again because they are citizens. Notice how they could attack Brussels internatio...

Objectifying women to promote sales is an age old technique. But is it right to blame a company for showing what (many) people obviously want to see? Is it even fair to expect a company to follow a code of morality that many of us want but is not even close to reality? Microsoft, a company I don’t exactly like, is the trigger for these questions. At the 2016 Game Developers Conference , writes TC Sottek : “Attendees of Microsoft's GDC party were greeted by women dancing on platforms — a choice made not by the venue but by Microsoft. ” (In case you’re wondering, this wasn’t a Windows or Office launch! It was a forum to show the latest from Microsoft’s video/computer games division. Such games appeal to a mostly male audience, hence…). Many of us can agree with Sottek’s lament: “Conferences like CES and E3 were notorious for many years for using "booth babes" to promote their brands and products by baiting the male gaze .” But is Microsoft (or any other ga...

The JNU/ Kanhaiya Kumar episode is old news; but only recently did I read a very interesting analysis of why events may have played out the way they did. No, it goes beyond the usual screaming sessions on TV as to whether calls to break up India crossed all kinds of lines or whether nothing better can be expected from a right wing government. I feel Santosh Desai is right in an additional aspect to this saga : “There is a red hot anger … and it is one that comes from a very real place. For long now, the right wing support base has nurtured fears about the intentions of the left-leaning elite. The suspicion was that the sympathy for Muslims was so great and the hatred for Modi so profound that they would actively wish for harm to befall India.” In such an environment, throw in a right wing government with absolute majority, a left wing university like JNU and calls for breaking up India and fireworks are not altogether a surprise, are they? “A lot of hitherto imagined fear...

Back in 1931, the historian Herbert Butterfield condemned the “Whig interpretation of history”. Huh? The term refers to the interpretation of the past in terms of modern knowledge. Butterfield minced no words: “The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history.” Most of Butterfield’s criticism was about moral judgments on historical figures and events. Having read Jack Weatherford’s brilliant book titled Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World , I agreed with Butterfield. Sure, Genghis Khan wasn’t a saint, but was he really worse than the savagery of the Europeans of the day, asked Weatherford. No, Genghis was far better, concluded the book. While it does make sense to not be “whiggish” in some sorts of history, isn’t it OK in case of the history of science, asks physicist Steven Weinberg . After all: “It is clearly not possible to speak of right and wrong in the history of art or fashion, nor ...

Adam Smith once wondered that even though water is far more critical to life than diamonds, it is diamonds that are worth so much more! Jeff Jarvis asks the modern day equivalent of that question: “If information is so much more valuable to society than entertainment, why is it so hard to build a business—namely, journalism—around selling access to information?” In contrast to movies and serials that continue to thrive. His answer is very, well, informative. The key point? “Information itself cannot and must not be owned…That is, you cannot copyright the  fact  that the Higgs boson was discovered at CERN in 2012, you can copyright only your  treatment  of that information: your cogent backgrounder or natty graphic that explains WTF a boson is. ” If you are wondering why society should not allow the information to owned by anyone, here’s why: “Society cannot find itself in a position in which information is property to be owned, for then the authoriti...

The environmental cost of the fast economic growth is visible in the capitals of the two fastest growing economies in the world: Beijing and New Delhi. The solutions, unfortunately, are not easy. No, it’s not just political or vested interests that are the problem. The bigger problem is the old ecology saying: “You can’t do just one thing.” Expanded, that means that you can’t change one element of an ecosystem without having unintended consequences on other parts of the ecosystem. Take the obvious solution of finding a viable fuel source than oil. That very prospect puts the oil producers on their guard because as Anatole Kaletsky says : “Environmental pressures and advances in clean energy (would) transform much of their oil into a worthless “stranded asset” that can never be used or sold.” So what do the oil producers do? Apart from lobbying, they start pumping as much as oil as they can before it becomes a “stranded asset”. Consequences? a)      Th...

Why do articles have headlines? It’s a historical legacy, says John Herrman : “If your primary mode of story discovery is to look at a newspaper frontpage, you need headlines to tell you where to go. ” But as content discovery on the Internet happens more and more via social media, are article headlines still relevant? After all, as Jonah Peretti points out : “What do people add to a story when they share it? In some cases it’s better than the headline that our team wrote and in some cases shows why content matters to them.” In this new social media driving traffic world, Herrman says that article headlines can even be a source of confusion! “To click on “RIP Headlines,” a headline, and arrive at a page that has another headline, along the lines of “Why We Don’t Need Headlines,” is something we’re very used to doing. But it should feel like a form of deceit. It tells a reader, though you might not receive it this way, that the headline you were initially interested in is...

Remember that time when a computer called Deep Blue beat then chess world champion, Garry Kasparov? Well, the Chinese board game called Go is exponentially more complex than chess. In other words, for a computer to beat a Go Grandmaster, we’d need to devise new techniques in computer science. Like AI (Artificial Intelligence) and machine learning. Looks like we just got there: Google’s AI program called AlphaGo beat Go Grandmaster Lee Sedol in a 5 game series, thrice in the first 3 games! In the 2 nd game, the computer made a move that shook up everyone, a la the one that messed up Kasaparov . Except, this move wasn’t a bug. So how shook up were the people who saw the move? Lee Sedol, the Grandmaster, was so taken aback that he stood up and left the match room . For 15 minutes . One of the match’s English language commentators said, “That’s a very strange move”. As this article said : “ The commentators couldn’t even begin to evaluate the merits of the move.” So how ...

Some (or maybe all?) schools teach kids to associate sounds with letters of the English alphabet; and then use that association later on to teach them spelling. Try doing that second part (spelling by sound association) in your head and you’ll be wondering how anyone who knows English thought that this idea could possibly work! After all, as John McWhorter wrote in this great article : “For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal.” But wait, continues McWhorter, spoken English is no less weird: “It’s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet.” But we Indians can surely appreciate that part. Take gender association with objects in other languages, says McWhorter: “We think it’s a nuisance...

When we went to Wonder La , a Disneyland kind of park outside Bangalore, it was amusing how all the kids will turn the steering wheel on their cars/ carts/ wagons. Then my wife noticed that all the seats of the rides, including the back seats , had steering wheels: looks like every kid wants one to turn. Old enough to steer, and young enough to not know the co-ordination nightmare such a vehicle would be in real life! As we grow older, we need to be willing to suspend disbelief to achieve the same feeling. That raises the bar for the makers of TV serials and movies and writers because, as C Dixon wrote : “We start to believe only when we become sufficiently immersed.” But can Virtual Reality (VR) get us to believe more easily, wonders Dixon: “In the VR community, “presence” is a term of art. It’s the idea that once VR reaches a certain quality level your brain is actually tricked   —   at the lowest, most primal level   —   into believing that what you see in front of you...

I’ve often wished that an Indian Army guy would talk about their role the way Jack Nicholson spoke in the movie, A Few Good Men : “We (soldiers) use words like "honor," "code," "loyalty." We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punch line… I would rather that you just said "thank you" and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand the post.” Unfortunately, the only Indian soldiers who do talk are (or about to become) politicians. And then I stumbled upon the blogs of Lt Gen Syed Ata Hasnain. Boy, is he an excellent blogger, without any jingoism! Talking of the situation in Kashmir, he brought out something many of us forget: how much things have improved since the worst: “'The Last Mile' is simply a situation which is a symbolization of the last stages of conflict stabilization in the military domain; quite different from the political, ideological and...

Miriam Meckel defined serendipity thus: “Serendipity is involved when we enter a book store and stumble on a random book that we would have never read, had it not been in the right place at the perfect time. It is serendipity, when we browse through a newspaper report and suddenly find ourselves riveted by its content even though we were neither interested nor familiar with the topic only minutes ago.” In the digital age, Google has been accused of killing serendipity in two ways. First, since it can find whatever you query for, it inevitably reduced random, aimless browsing that in turn meant lesser odds of stumbling onto something interesting by accident. Second, as Google stored more and data about people, it started tailoring its results based on your past history, to show you what you liked (clicked) in the past. The latter is what Meckel criticizes the second aspect: “It’s a life in the rear view mirror. The algorithms which compute all these recommendations and sugges...

The famous economist, John Maynard Keynes supposedly said: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” And yet, it is so hard to do for most people most of the time. In his book, Superpredictors , Philip Tetlock has a great explanation as to why people resist changing their minds (no, the reason’s not always ego): “Visualize the children’s game Jenga, which starts with building blocks stacked one on top of another to form a little tower. Players take turns removing building blocks until someone removes the block that topples the tower. Our beliefs about ourselves and the world are built on each other in a Jenga-like fashion.” When people find a core belief proven wrong, the reason they resist is: “It’s a lot harder to pull that block out without upsetting other blocks.” A big chunk of the tower of beliefs may come crashing down: that’s why people are so pig-headed. This made a whole lot of sense. It also explains why kids seem so open to chang...