Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Have you ever felt (or been told) that you’re wasting your vote by voting for a candidate or party that has no chance of winning the election? In the US, the shrillness of such accusations has gone up a notch, as pointed out by Alan Jacobs : “I keep hearing from Trump supporters that if I vote for a third-party or write-in candidate — for convenience’ sake let’s say Evan McMullin, though I may not  choose him — in this election I’m “really” or “effectively” voting for Hillary Clinton. When I ask how that works exactly, I am told that it’s because Hillary is leading and therefore my McMullin vote isn’t allowing Trump to catch up.” Wait a minute, argues Jacobs. The winner in the US isn’t the guy who won the most votes (same as India and UK), and so voting for the 3 rd party candidate means different things in different states: “The argument must be that if you vote for McMullin in a state where Hillary is ahead, you’re voting for Hillary, but if you do it in a state w...

When Usain Bolt wins a race, it is obvious who won. It is not a subjective decision. Not so with the Nobel Prize that is highly subjective. And outrageously dumb at other times. Did you know Einstein never won a Nobel for his Theory of Relativity? (He won it for something else). Wow! So the man didn’t win a Nobel for the theory that changed our understanding of the universe?! I feel that even more strongly in hyper-subjective fields like literature. To make things even more subjective, people win that prize for stuff written in different languages. Who exactly is qualified to compare stuff in English v/s Tamil v/s Swahili v/s Chinese? Literature is often tied to the context; so not only does the judge need to know the language, (s)he needs to know the culture. Good luck finding such people anywhere on the planet. I woudn’t be ranting on this if it were some random prize. But this is one of those “confirming authority” prizes, as in what Calvin told Hobbes: “They only recogn...

To summarize the story so far , using words from Barbara Tuchman’s book, The March of Folly : “The British believed… in imperial terms as governors to the governed. The colonials considered themselves equals, resented interference and sniffed tyranny in every breeze over the Atlantic.” The Americans soon realized they could hit England where it hurt, without firing a shot: by reducing British imports and start manufacturing themselves. The slide down the slippery slope had started. England’s response was “asserting a right you know you cannot exert”. The “terrible encumbrance” of pride and principle were beginning to trump pragmatism. Of course, some of the thinking was rational: if they let the Americans act this way, would the Irish do the same? And so, from here on, every act on either side was misinterpreted: “(The Americans) assumed the British were more rational, just as the British government assumed they were more rebellious, than was true in either case.” And as mo...

“No taxation without representation”. And the Boston Tea Party. That’s about all I knew about American independence. Until I read Barbara Tuchman’s awesome book, The March of Folly . It all started with the Seven Years’ War, a war over who controlled America: the British, the French or the native Indians. The British won; and so America became a British colony. After that arose the fairly reasonable question in England: shouldn’t the colony pay for its continued protection from the native Indians and the resurgent French? The Americans, however, didn’t think of it that way: they felt the money would be used to pay British troops to act as “a rod and check over us”. The seeds of mistrust were sown. The topic of taxation brought with it an unintended debate. Unlike most other colonies, the inhabitants of America (leaving the Indians aside) were British citizens . And so they asked for the “Englishman’s right not to be taxed except by his own representatives”. How come the Engli...

Technology and the arts. Sounds like one of those “never the twain shall meet” cases, right? While that is indeed true an overwhelmingly large amount of the time, every now and then someone joins the two and the result is pure magic. Steve Jobs said it perfectly with the perfect image in the background : “We’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. To be able to get the best of both. To make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view, but also have them be intuitive easy-to-use, fun-to-use, so that they really fit the users.” Apple’s VP of Design, Jony Ive, on the iPad: “The face of the product is pretty much defined by a single piece of multi-touch glass. And that’s it. There’s no pointing device. There’s isn’t even a single orientation. There’s no up, there’s no down. There’s no right way of holding it. I don’t have to change myself to change the product. It fits me.” So why don’t more companies aim for this tech-a...

I found Horace Dediu’s article on what “innovation” means at the workplace an eye-opened. He identifies 4 related terms (each term includes the attributes of the terms preceding it): - Novelty : something new, may or may not have any value. - Creation : something new and valuable, but like art or books. - Invention : something patentable. - Innovation : valuable in the market place; often includes not just the invention but even the method to make money out of it. Thus, for Dediu, Google’s innovation is not just the search algorithm; it is also the way to make money (ads linked to your search terms). That certainly explains why so many people feel all confused about the word “innovation” at the workplace. Based on our schooling, we don’t think of the “How will it make money?” question as part of an innovation. And so end up feeling all confused (This isn’t to pass a judgment on what is right: it’s just to explain that the term “innovation” in the corporate world includ...

As Donald Trump finally seems to be imploding, Matt Taibbi wrote : “There are not many places left for this thing to go that don't involve kids or cannibalism.” Trump’s party still doesn’t seem to know how to handle the situation: “The strategy seemed to be to pretend none of it had happened, and to hide behind piles of the same worn clichés.” Assuming Trump is toast, the next question is whether he was a one-off case of such a candidate reaching this far? Tiabbi is not so sure. After all, he says: “All 16 of the non-Trump entrants were dunces, religious zealots, wimps or tyrants, all equally out of touch with voters.” John Scalzi is even more alarmed. Here’s why : “Donald Trump is not a black swan… He is the end result of conscious and deliberate choices by the GOP, going back decades, to demonize its opponents, to polarize and obstruct, to pursue policies that enfeeble the political weal and to yoke the bigot and the ignorant to their wagon.” In American lingo...

A couple of years back, while we were driving, my daughter saw a stuffed toy she liked in the rear window of another car. “Let’s ask that kid to give it to me”, she said. Why would he give it to you, we countered. “Because my ma’am says sharing is a good habit ”, she responded. More recently, we’ve noticed that anytime we ask her to respond fast or to complete whatever she’s doing early, she’ll respond by saying, “ You should learn to wait ”. That’s a line we’ve used on her many, many times. Without effect, of course. The common theme of both those lines? She’s taking the same approach that all adults do: Do as I say, not as I do. You’re growing up fast, kiddo! At other times, though, she’s still a kid (obviously). Like the time when her yoga teacher (a neighbor) shouted at her for something, she told us about it. Seeing that “You must have deserved it” look on our faces, she continued: “But nobody other than you is allowed to shout at me, right? So how can she shou...

In her terrific book, The March of Folly , Barbara Tuchman has a section on the “Renaissance Popes”, and how the cumulative acts of those 6 Popes led to the eventual Protestant split. No man is an island, neither in space nor in time. And so says Tuchman: “To understand the popes, we must look at the princes (of the time).” It was a twisted dance: the Popes would grant their seal of approval on certain rulers; and in return, those rejected, would wage varying degrees of war on the papal states. Policies were “only the momentary dictates of unstable fortune”. As at all times, the enemy of the enemy became a friend. Even if that happened to be the infidel Muslim! “(Pope) Innocent’s intention was to use Djem as a means of war on the Sultan… Thus the Grand Turk, brother of the “beast of the Apocalypse,” took up his abode in the house of the Pope, the heart of Christendom.” The refusal to annul Henry VIII’s marriage was based, not on religious grounds, but on the fact that his...

Elon Musk is a man who wants to change the world. Through his companies. As Google founder Larry Page said, here’s what Musk seeks to do: “Solve cars, global warming, and make humans interplanetary.” (The car + global warming fix is electric cars, via his company Tesla. The let’s-settle-in-Mars attempt is via his other company, SpaceX). It’s his successes at revolutionizing Internet payments via PayPal first and making electric cars sexy via Tesla that makes Page wonder: “Maybe it’s not luck. He’s done it twice… Maybe we should get him to do more things.” But wait a minute: colonizing Mars? Is Musk delusional? Then consider what his friend Jim Cantrell said on Quora : “I am going to suggest that he is successful not because his visions are  grand, not because he is extraordinarily smart and not because he works incredibly hard.  All of those things are true.  The one major important distinction that sets him apart is his inability to consider failure. ...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan , wrote this semi-literal, semi-satirical piece titled “The Intellectual Yet Idiot” , IYI for short in the rest of his article (and this blog). So who is an IYI? “(The) class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.” Sound familiar? IYI’s are theoriticians, with no connection in real life to what they like to preach about. Or as Taleb says, they have no skin in the game. The IYI is smug and arrogant: “The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is  his  understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests  and  he knows their interests.” And: “What we generally call participation in the political process, he cal...

Quitting at the top: it’s almost unheard of. The way Tendulkar dragged on and on is the norm rather than the exception. When past their prime, Pele and Beckham went to play in the US, not exactly a country that cares about football soccer. Roger Federer doesn’t call it a day though it’s now years since he won a Grand Slam event. Contrast that with Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. He tried to stop the series when it was still popular, but fans forced him to resurrect the detective. JK Rowling, author of Harry Potter, first billionaire author in history, evoked admiration when she decided to call it a day, as Anthony L Hall wrote : “My admiration also stemmed from her steadfast pledge that there would be ‘no more Harry Potter,’ despite all things Potter being a veritable license to print money.” Unfortunately, Rowling didn’t keep her word. She continued with tweets, continuations, editorializings, and even a sequel. Actually, let’s be honest: most of us wo...