Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Was the Brexit vote the “wrong” choice? The experts certainly think so; but then again, did the experts see the financial crisis of 2008 coming? If they couldn’t see the greatest financial catastrophe since the Great Depression, should we really believe their doomsday predictions now? In Thinking, Fast and Slow , Daniel Kahneman said that the reason experts fail may not be arrogance. Rather: “The reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident .” Overconfident and arrogance: it’s a critical difference. Arrogance is without basis; overconfidence is a problem of degree. Note how this rules out the seemingly obvious solution of calling oneself useless. If you consider yourself terrible, would you have any confidence in your forecasts?! In fact, as Philip Tetlock wrote in Superforecasting , what we need is a different kind of humility: “The humility required for good judgment is not s

Once upon a time, maps were valuable. I remember this one time when we were going back home from Noida and I referred to Eicher Maps to find the way. I was so impressed with Eicher Maps, both its accuracy and its level of detail. With the advent of the smartphone, wrote Justin O’Bierne : “An unprecedented level of detail is now available to the average person, for little or no cost.” You’d expect this to be the “golden age of maps and map-reading”. But as Nick Carr points out : “Even as the map is becoming omnipresent, the map is fading in importance.” Huh? But how can that be? Driving (or walking) directions are the culprit! “If your phone will give you detailed directions whenever you need them, telling you where and when to turn, or your car or other vehicle will get you where you want to go automatically on command, then there’s no need to consult a map to figure out where you are or where you’re going. If a machine can read a map, a person doesn’t have to.” A

Almost everyone with a device (computer, phone, tablet) connected to the Internet worries about security or performance impact. Anti-virus packages can only help so much: they are engaged in an endless evolutionary war with the viruses: each side evolves, adapts and improvises, but neither ever wins the war for good. Jane Chong asked the question as to why software companies are not held liable for the quality of what they sell. Why were there vulnerabilities that could be exploited? Shouldn’t it be the company’s responsibility to test it thoroughly? In exasperation, she writes: “Dazzled by what software makes possible—the highs—we have embedded into our lives a technological medium capable of bringing society to its knees, but from which we demand virtually no quality assurance.” She denounces the software industry’s response that bad things happen because users often “fail to implement adequate security”. I don’t know if Chong understands the first thing about software, b

When it came to Game of Thrones , I used to be like Clive James : “Like anybody both adult and sane, I had no intention of watching “Game of Thrones,” even though the whole world was already talking about it.” I used to think Game of Thrones was based on a video game. And since I never liked anything onscreen that was based on a video game (not even Lara Croft , which starred Angeline Jolie), I never bothered about Game of Thrones either. Until I ended up watching one episode for lack of anything else on TV. And boy, have I been hooked ever since. And understand why it’s as popular as Star Trek . First off, it’s not based on a video game. It’s based on a series of books, though I’ve never read them. Set in medieval times, it has swords, cunning, betrayals, even dragons, and as the title suggests, power plays. To top it off, it has awesome dialogs and even better characters, played by actors who play the part perfectly. There’s Queen Cersei Lannister, the femme fatale

Many brands in the US have, well, misspelled names. Like Dunkin’ Donuts (not Doughnuts), Froot Loops, Cheez-It, Flickr (not Flicker) or Tumblr (not Tumbler). If you attribute this to American stupidity, you’d be as wrong as you are contemptuous. In case of tech companies, it’s because they’ve often been founded by kids in college. Nancy Friedman, a branding consultant: “Professional name developers usually advise against spelling or punctuation that requires repeated explanation, won’t translate into print, and doesn’t contribute to actual distinctiveness—but many companies and products are named by entrepreneurs who don’t seek, or follow, professional advice.” In other cases, it’s because of what Vanitha Swaminathan, who teaches at the Katz Graduate School of Business says: “One way in which brands can be memorable is to kind of switch or change something about the spelling so that it stands out in your memory and it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.” And sometimes, i

And so we have yet another terrorist attack in France, this time in Nice. As Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi wrote : “This time, they chose to attack on Bastille Day, the very symbol of freedom, liberality and democracy, abhorred by the extremist Islamist outfits and their Salafist ideologues.” So will the reaction be any different this time? Of course not. It will be the usual meaningless statements of solidarity by world leaders, the changing of profile pics on Facebook to have French colors, and, what Sreemoy Talukdar points out : “The prevalent discourse around terrorism is rendered ineffective and ultimately useless by the mind-bending political correctness and an obdurate denial to link it to Islam.” And the best worst part of this denial? “Even when perpetrators repeatedly evoke their unflinching faith in the greatness of god during the very acts of violence — as, for instance, they did during the Charlie Hebdo attacks or the present tragedy in Nice — there is stout insisten

Toyota made the just-in-time style of inventory management world famous: all the pieces came together exactly when they were needed. Which sounds like common sense at first: after all, if the pieces came earlier than they were needed, you had to find a place to store them (that costs money and could lead to excess inventory); and if they came later, well, you were going to be late. What Toyota really gets the credit for is for having devised (and executed) a system that managed to achieve this in real life. Shane Parrish points out that we’ve now taken the same just-in-time approach towards information: “We really seek out signal is when we need it the most: right before we make a decision.” Which of course can be very dangerous: you act based on what you get your hands on instead of trying to get the big picture. And you don’t have the time to reflect or analyze thoroughly. On the positive side, Parrish points out that: “If we can’t connect the current situation to somet

Remember that tale of how Arjuna could see nothing other than the eye of the (wooden) bird he was aiming at? That was lauded by his guru as a sign of being focused on the task at hand. Or as Yoda from Star Wars said, “Your focus is your reality.” Today, staying focused is so very hard, because the “tide of technological revolution” that the philosopher Martin Heidegger warned about in the 1950’s is pounding us with tsunami after tsunami of data, e-mails, Facebook updates, tweets and WhatsApp messages all the time. But not everyone feels this is a bad thing. Like Rob Horning who described how Internet consumption has changed his writing : “I’ve grown incapable of researching as preparation for some writing project — I post everything, write immediately as a way to digest what I am reading, make spontaneous arguments and connections from what is at hand. Then if I feel encouraged, I go back and try to synthesize some of this material later. That seems a very Internet-inspired

ROI. It stands for “Return On Investment”. To put it crudely, it’s the “How much do you get in return?” question. A must-ask question in business, but considered a mark of selfishness in other fields. Like aid, philanthropy or charity. That is why this comment by a reader of the Dish was so thought-provoking: “Aid itself is a brilliant idea, and one with far-reaching and lasting effects, but there are basically no metrics for ROI, and nobody is acting to direct it intelligently. This happens because of the phenomenon Easterly notes, wherein people truly donate to feel good, not to actually effect change (which requires much more work).” And when doing good becomes an end in itself (without caring about the results), people sometimes stop asking whether they are even focusing on the most important problem: “The fact of the matter is that diarrhea is still the number-one infectious disease killer in the developing world, with HIV/AIDS so far off in the distance as to be virt

There are lots of Western articles on the Net moaning that democracy has stopped working; some going as far as to say that elections are bad for democracy ! The “evidence”? Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump. This sounds like a stupid and dangerous argument. In fact, it sounds like what everyone who doesn’t like the outcome of any election would say, doesn’t it? Instead, I feel that Santosh Desai nails the underlying theme that is playing out: simplification. -          Brexit was a complicated question with a simple answer: “Yes or No. In or Out.” -          Trump calls out everything as black or white. Good or bad. And so says Desai: “When what you feel is what is right, the world becomes so much easier to deal with. Brexit and Trump both connect with an emotional truth that precedes logic.” But why is this so appealing even in sophisticated Western democracries? “The dominant intellectual constructs of the time impose a standard of behavior that renders ill

Every time a non-First World country hosts the Olympics or football World Cup, a bunch of people in India will start lamenting that India can’t host such an event. The most recent for such comments is Brazil hosting the Olympics. Forget the Kalmadi fiasco and how such an event would actually be handled in India. Even if it were managed right, should any country in their right mind want to host such an event? National ego boosting aside, it is almost always financially ruinous. Even for rich countries that already have good facilities, hotels and transport systems in place. A poor country has to build even those; and such projects always overrun their budget, even in rich countries . London (2012) did an accounting trick to claim they came in under budget: they simply increased the planned cost value from £2.4 billion to £9 billion! So how much do countries spend in hosting an Olympics? An analysis of all events from 1988 (Seoul) to 2016 (Rio) indicate that the cheapest

Brexit is proving to be extremely messy. PM Cameron resigned; but suggested he might hang around for 3 months. That, of course, made the EU frothing mad: with nobody in power for 3 months, who’d they negotiate with? The UK government has to invoke Article 50 of the EU treaty, a formal notification to leave. With Cameron a lame duck, who’s going to that? Besides, the referendum is non-binding: so in theory , the government could choose to ignore the result altogether. Which, by the way, is exactly what many petitioners for a re-referendum want! Weirdly, even 2.3 million who voted to leave say they have changed their minds! Already? The phenomenon’s being called Bregret. Scotland’s representatives at the EU Parliament repeatedly pointed out that they had voted to stay; and the EU should keep that in mind. A thinly veiled hint that Scotland intends to secede and would want to be a part of the EU. Whenever Article 50 is activated, it would just start the clock on a 2-year