Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Laura Miller wrote this article titled “Is reading antisocial?” . Most of us would agree with her point that reading is a private activity. And yet, she points out: “Because reading a great book can be so overwhelmingly gratifying and transformative, many of us yearn to share the experience with the people we care about. That’s why we join book groups and pester our friends to read our favorites.” So she tried out several reading apps to make notes and read the notes of others reading the same book. But they didn't work for her for one or the other reason (strangers with totally different perspectives or friends not being able to read at/around the same time or friends not being able to settle on a common book to read in the first place). And so Miller concluded that: “I suspect that, despite our pervasively socially networked culture, willful idiosyncrasy remains the very essence of reading. A book, and especially a novel, is a world you can enter at a time of your o...

Take these 2 quotes about the purpose of a corporation. The first one is by Brad Bird, winner of two Oscars: “Walt Disney’s mantra was, “I don’t make movies to make money—I make money to make movies.” That’s a good way to sum up the difference between Disney at its height and Disney when it was lost. It’s also true of Pixar and a lot of other companies. It seems counterintuitive, but for imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can’t be the focus. Speaking personally, I want my films to make money, but money is just fuel for the rocket. What I really want to do is to go somewhere. I don’t want to just collect more fuel.” The second one is by Jony Ive, Apple’s user interface God: “We are really pleased with our revenues but our goal isn't to make money. It sounds a little flippant, but it's the truth. Our goal and what makes us excited is to make great products. If we are successful people will like them and if we are operationally competent, ...

Every time the BJP/NDA comes to power, a bunch of Indians will say that history is getting rewritten and distorted in school books. Is that true? Maybe. But as Ramachandra Guha points out in this interview : “In all fairness, you should say that the original sinner was the Congress…  (that) portrayed a vision of modern Indian history in which, apart from Mahatma Gandhi, all the great figures were from one family.” And so we saw a response: “As Gopal Gandhi puts it, Congress disowned Patel, and that allowed the BJP to misappropriate Patel… (even though) Patel was not part of the BJP or the Sangh Parivar or the RSS.” And then social media came into the “conversation”: “[The narrative turned into] ‘Patel is a great figure and Nehru unfairly sidelined him, Gandhi should have made Patel Prime Minister’”. Both the Congress and the BJP avoid the much more nuanced reality. So too does social media: “They don’t understand the complexity of that time. And above all they d...

In a world where political correctness has gone overboard and everyone seems to be corrupt, a backlash was inevitable. Is being obnoxious the oral version of that backlash, wonders Santosh Desai: “The idea of truth has become so severely compromised that professed strength is seen to be a substitute for it. In a world where everyone is deemed corrupt, calling other people names without any restraint becomes decoded as a sign of honesty.” But why is obnoxious so appealing to us? “The directness, the uncomplicated self absorption, and the primitive nature of the promise combine to create a compelling force that we find easy to give in to… the most important reason for the success of the obnoxious is that they are always entertaining.” Entertainment: it’s been what the masses wanted ever since the time of the gladiators, bread and circuses! In another blog, Desai wonders if this is just a transition phase of democracy , caused by social media: “Social media, by giving v...

Like it or not, as everything goes digital, algorithms (software rules) will make more and more decisions for us. Every now and then, those rules will misfire. Note that this is totally different than good old bugs in the software; the issue is with the algorithm not being appropriate in a specific context or time period. Let’s take 2 very recent examples of this problem. Remember that famous 1972 pic from the Vietnam War of a naked, 9-year-old girl fleeing napalm bombs? When a Norwegian newspaper, Aftenposten , posted that pic on Facebook (in the context of the horrors of war), Facebook’s algorithms removed the pic because it was (mis)identified as child porn. An honest mistake, obviously. But Aftenpost ’s editor, Espen Egil Hansen, wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerburg : “Please try to envision a new war where children will be the victims of barrel bombs or nerve gas. Would you once again intercept the documentation of cruelties, just because a tiny minority might possibly ...

Ernest Rutherford, the famous scientist, once declared: “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” James Watson, (co)discoverer of the famous double helix structure of the DNA molecule, felt that the knowledge of how information is stored in DNA as something that would change the way biology was done. As Siddhartha Mukherjee wrote in his awesome book, The Gene : “Watson called the old biologists “stamp collectors” – mocking their preoccupation with the collection and classification of biological specimens.” Take this instance: a recent study declared that an animal that we considered as a single species, the giraffe, was actually 4 separate species . How did they come to the conclusion? Based on the genetic differences amongst them. Plus, the point that the 4 groups don’t breed with each other. Further, as this article says : “That analysis confirmed it’s been one to two million years since giraffe species diverged—showing how distinct the animals are from one a...

In their book, 13 Bankers , Johnson and Kwik talk about how the American financial industry has the lawmakers (politicians) in their pockets. Obviously, you smirk: those companies fund the politicians’ campaigns. But there’s more to it than just that: many politicians sincerely and genuinely believe that capitalism is good and that markets are best left with minimal regulation. Of course, capitalism isn’t the only ideology, the belief in which can be dangerous. So can a messianic belief in equality or harmonious-coexistence-of-everything-in-nature. Huh? How can that be, you ask. In his awesome book, The Gene , Siddhartha Mukherjee talks about the communist/Soviet belief that all life forms could be changed to be the same way via (what else) indoctrination policies. Their “reeducation” campaigns are notorious, but it wasn’t just a political act. The Soviets genuinely believed in the malleability of individuals. Why else would the Soviets claim the success of similar approac...

The ongoing threat of riots, violence and the imposition of curfew in Bangalore raises an interesting question: What triggers such a drastic different-from-normal behavior in so many people, either at the same time or spread over time in a copycat manner? If you responded with the word “Politicians”, think again. After all, the risings in the Arab world a few years back, from Morocco to Libya; as well as the rising in the communist countries of eastern Europe (1989) were directed against politicians . Or think about the acts of Islamic terrorists who grew up in Europe, who seem to associate with groups far, far away. Previous answers to this question in the context of riots, as Malcolm Gladwell points out , usually considered two options: 1)       “ A crowd cast a kind of intoxicating spell over its participants”. 2)      Or “maybe at the moment a riot was beginning people changed their beliefs”. Stanford sociologist Mark Gran...

Scott Adams found that many readers of his book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big , considered “diet and exercise inappropriate "filler" for a book on success”. Adams being Adams wrote a blog explaining why they were wrong : “Studies show that exercise and diet have a huge influence on brain health. You need your brain for most occupational challenges...Stating the obvious, healthy people have fewer sick days than unhealthy people...Depending on your sporting preferences, exercise might be a great networking tool as well...Exercise and proper nutrition have a huge impact on your stress levels. And you know you don't operate efficiently when your body is in stress mode.” Hard to argue with any of that. Except we don't look at things that way. Adams blames the media for that: “I blame the media for putting diet and exercise in the "vanity" bucket while hard work and education are in the "success" bucket.” This reminded...

The number, 1729, is called the Hardy–Ramanujan number based on a famous anecdote. When GH Hardy visited Ramanujan, he mentioned the number of the cab he rode was 1729. Hardy then remarked that the number didn’t seem special in any way. Wrong, said Ramanujan: “It is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.” The two different ways are: 1729 = 1 3   + 12 3   = 9 3   + 10 3 Genius, we think! And yes, Ramanujan was a genius. But can how a genius thinks ever be explained? In this instance, maybe so. The starting point is this anecdote from Richard Feynman’s book, Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman! Engaged in an arithmetical duel against the abacus, one of the challenges was to come up with cube root of 1729.03. Here’s how Feynman thought: -          He knew that one cubic foot is 1728 cubic inches, a number very close to 1729.03 -   ...

You thought we carried genes from both our parents, right? That’s only partially true. As most of us know, we have 23 pairs of chromosomes that are indeed the mix of genes from both our parents. Apart from that, as Siddhartha Mukherjee explains in his masterpiece, The Gene , there’s also the mitochondria within which each cell that has its own set of genes that has nothing in common with the rest of our genes! Further, the genes of the mitochondria come only from the mother . Now consider the full implication of this. Or if you can’t, let Mukherjee explain it for you. The genes in your mitochondria are identical to those in your mother, who in turn got them from her mother and so on… it’s only women all the way up the mitochondrial chain. Or to put it differently, a male is a dead end as far as the transmission of the mitochondria gene set is concerned. Now comes the best part: A world-wide survey (across races and countries) of the human mitochondrial DNA in 1987 yielded a ...

  When I read this line Kathryn Schulz’ book, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error , it sounded both true and arrogant: “As with dying, we recognize erring as something that happens to everyone, without feeling that it is either plausible or desirable that it will happen to us.” She says this belief is perfectly understandable because it affirms “our sense of being smart”. And that is exactly why we hate to be wrong. As Shane Parrish says, “it leaves us feeling idiotic and ashamed”. On the lighter side, I loved these lines by Parrish: “The sentence "I am wrong" describes a logical impossibility. As soon as we know that we are wrong, we aren’t wrong anymore, since to recognize a belief as false is to stop believing it. Thus we can only say "I was wrong." Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Error: we can be wrong, or we can know it, but we can’t do both at the same time.” Failure is a bigger version of being wrong about something....