Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Kids who are very good at sports obviously need to spend most of their time practicing. That in turn leaves no time for studies. Parents of such kids therefore get them admitted to schools that promote sports because then the school will ensure that such kids pass the exams. I remember my mom talking about the “nudge” to pass Ajay Jadeja when she taught him (if that’s indeed the word for a student who rarely comes to class) at Sardar Patel Vidyalaya. Some teachers resent the situation. Others let it go. Yet others feel it’s a necessary stance to take if we want to encourage kids to look at sports as a career option. Of course, the kid in question knows the situation. And flaunts it. Andre Agassi, in his awesome autobiography titled Open , admits just that from his stint at a hostel-like tennis academy owned by the then famous Nick Bollettieri, an academy that also provided schooling: “The teachers know that their jobs depend on Nick, so they can’t flunk us, and we cherish o

There’s that famous saying about those who don’t learn from history being doomed to repeat it. But isn’t what Nassim Taleb wrote in The Black Swan equally true about the dangers of trying to learn from history? “History is useful for the thrill of knowing the past, and for the narrative (indeed), provided it remains a harmless narrative. One should learn under severe caution. History is certainly not a place to theorize or derive general knowledge, nor is it meant to help in the future, without some caution. We can get negative confirmation from history, which is invaluable, but we get plenty of illusions of knowledge along with it.” Taleb does have a point. Take the infamous Treaty of Versailles that was imposed by the victors of World War I on Germany. Everybody talks of that treaty as if it was an obvious blunder (the reasoning is that it imposed such impossible and brutal terms that it just sowed the seeds for World War II). But guess what? The French, who pushed the most

As it becomes mandatory to link Aadhar to more and more things (though real estate continues to be the exception, the elephant in the room), Airtel’s decision to sneakily link Aadhar data obtained from its mobile subscribers to create accounts in Airtel Payments Bank has drawn fire. And rightly so. This Deccan Herald editorial describes what happened: “Its (Airtel’s) mobile app had a pre-checked box, and if the customer did not uncheck it her consent for creating a payments bank wallet using mobile KYC was assumed. It was an easy method of customer acquisition but amounted to fraud and showed the danger of misuse of personal data when it falls into private hands.” Next, a flaw in the Aadhar rules was discovered as a result of this incident: “Many direct benefit transfer (DBT) scheme payments like LPG subsidies go into the accounts to which Aadhaar was last linked, rather than to beneficiaries' regular accounts.” Fortunately, this is one of those rare instances where

Most people, believers and atheists alike, wonder how a benevolent God could allow all the evils we see to persist. Oliver Burkeman in his book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking , writes: “In theology, the term ‘theodicy’ refers to the effort to maintain belief in a benevolent god, despite the prevalence of evil in the world; the phrase is occasionally used to describe the effort to maintain any belief in the face of contradictory evidence.” Continuing in the generalized meaning of the term, Chris Kayes coined an equivalent term in the context of goals we pursue: “goalodicy”. He describes it as the tendency of people to be “lured into destruction by their passion for goals”. But isn’t setting a goal and working towards it a good thing? Not always. After all, sometimes: “Clearly defined goals seemed to motivate people to cheat…Those given a target to reach lied far more frequently than did those instructed merely to ‘do your best’”. Then

Richard Feynman’s dad gave him an excellent example of confusing knowing the name of something with having knowledge about that thing: “The general principle is that things which are moving tend to keep on moving, and things which are standing still tend to stand still, unless you push them hard. This tendency is called ‘inertia,’ but nobody knows why it’s true.” In other words, “Inertia” is a term to describe observed behavior: it is not an explanation of the observed behavior. And yet most of us walk out of our physics class thinking we got an explanation! Next, take this example of how terms we coin can then mislead us when we continue to use those terms beyond their original context. In his book, Climbing Mount Improbable , Richard Dawkins cites one objection that many throw at the theory of evolution: if evolution is so gradual and happens incrementally rather than in big jumps, why don’t we find fossils corresponding to the gradual change? Why do we have fossils of o

In 1 st standard, my daughter has monthly tests, not exams. That means less content per cycle, but it also means the cycles are frequent. No wonder then that my daughter feels that barely have I stopped “troubling her” (her take on what we are doing to her life) for one round of tests that I am back for the next round. One time she tried telling me that she didn’t want to be a “studies champion”, only a “sports champion”. I’ve found that convincing a kid to do better at studies is very tough. I blame the grades system for this. At least with the good old marks system, even with a score of 99, one knew there was a little room for improvement. Not so with grades. When my daughter makes a mistake and I tell her to work harder next time, here are some of the arguments she has thrown back at me: -          “I will get an A+ even if I make one mistake.” -          “If I got an A+, it means my m’am is happy with me. Why do I have to improve?” I’ve heard my friends say they get pr

Matt Levine wrote this article on the characteristics of professions like lawyers, journalists, data scientists and bankers. About lawyers, he says, these are their ethics: “Oversimplifying massively, the basic rule for a lawyer is that your obligations are to your client, and you have to act in her best interests, even if that is against the interests of accuracy; legal ethics is then mostly a set of exceptions to this principle.” Journalism, on the other hand, has the opposite set of ethics: “Oversimplifying massively, the basic rule for a journalist is that your obligations are to the public, and you should be accurate even if that is against the interests of the people you talk to; journalistic ethics is then mostly a set of exceptions to this principle.” If, like me, you are wondering how any of this can be called “ethics”, then you’re not alone. Levine clarifies: “It is weird to think of them as "ethics." They are both functional systems adapted to the wo

As a teenager, I was fascinated by the Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Dancing Men . The story used a formula common to many of Doyle’s stories: someone in the US or Australia with a past that he wants buried returns to good old England, changes their name… until someone from their past catches up with them. But what piqued my interest in an otherwise formula story was the secret code used to send messages. Messages in the story would read like this: As you can see, the code consisted of figures of dancing men, hence the name of the story. When Holmes broke the code and sent a message in it to lure the culprit out, I dismissed it as something that happens only in stories. How can anyone crack a code based on just a few messages they’ve seen, I thought. Boy, I was so ignorant about codes and code breaking… Years later, I read Simon Singh’s awesome book on codes and code breaking titled (what else?) The Code Book . I was almost disappointed when I realized that the

A while back, I wrote about Google’s AI program called AlphaGo that beat the world human champion in a 5 match series. The same company then created another AI program that was not shown any games of Go masters to “learn” from. In fact, it was shown no games at all! It was only fed the rules of the game, that’s all. And it had 4 specialized processors unlike the 48 of AlphaGo. The speed at which the new AI learnt Go was scorching. Within 3 days (yes, days), it was better than the AI that beat the human world champion! Within 3 weeks , it could 60 of the world’s top players, including the updated version of AlphaGo! Beating 60 top players is impressive because usually, such programs are custom designed for one particular player and his style. Then they trained the AI’s guns on chess. Why chess, you wonder. Isn’t that old news in the man v/s machine saga? Didn’t Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov decades back? What’s left to prove on the chess front? Aha, unlike Deep Blue, the

If someone tells you that everything has a price, it sounds very commercial, a bit cynical and perhaps, even evil. But that isn’t always the case. Mohnish Pabrai says that the US regulatory body for aviation puts the “worth” of a human life at $3 million. (This number is revised periodically, to adjust for inflation). But what does that mean ? “What that means is that if there is a plane crash and 100 people die, the first thing they know is that the human cost of the incident is $300 million.” Set aside your morality; and pay attention to what this approach translates into. So what is the impact of the $3 million price tag? Pabrai explains: “What aviation companies will do is look at the number of people that will die in some kind of reasonable period of time; they’ll do some models, and they’ll figure out what amount they have to spend. If they believe that 100 people are going to die if they don’t do anything, that’s $300 million. So they’ll ask themselves, “Can we f

Hammurabi’s code, from almost 4,000 years back, includes the oft quoted construction law #229, something along these lines: “229. If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction firm, and the house which he has built collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be put to death.” Many people lament the lack of similar laws today. Not literally, but similar in spirit. After all, the benefits seem obvious, as the Farnam Street blog says : “Imagine yourself as a Babylonian builder. Each time you construct a house, there is a risk it will collapse if you make any mistakes. So, what do you do? You allow for the widest possible margin of safety. You plan for any potential risks. You don’t cut corners or try to save a little bit of money. No matter what, you are not going to allow any known flaws in the construction. It wouldn’t be worth it. You want to walk away certain that the house is solid.” The same article summarizes in

My 6 year-old loves the Computer Science period. Maybe it’s the teacher, maybe it’s the chance to go to a lab… who knows? Anyways, I wondered how she’d learn to type or get familiar with the keyboard layout. It’s not like a kid that age has anything to type, so what’s the incentive to struggle and learn, I thought. And then I saw this keyboard familiarization app called Tux Typing listed in her school book. I installed it on the laptop. As letters enclosed in fireballs dropped from the top, she had to find and hit those letters on the keyboard before the letter slammed into the buildings at the bottom of the screen. Fun way to familiarize oneself with the layout of a keyboard, I thought. Soon she had mastered it. Like any good pushy parent, I then increased the speed at which the letters fell. Inevitably, she lost all her lives quickly. Then, instead of practicing to master the higher speed, this was her solution: She: “You call out the letters as they fall. I’ll find

The next time you hear someone say that the “ordinary Pakistani citizen” doesn’t support terrorism, remember the “ordinary Roman citizen” who enjoyed gladiatorial contests, as Keith Hopkins wrote in his article, “Murderous Games” . Hopkins points out that back then, the Roman army practiced “decimation”, the practice of killing literally 1 in 10 in any army unit “judged disobedient or cowardly in battle”. And so, asks Hopkins: “When Romans were so unmerciful to each other, what mercy could prisoners of war expect?” Regardless of what the Asterisk comics may say, the Roman army was very effective, so much so that “the inner core of the Roman empire was virtually insulated from the direct experience of war”. And so those at the “inner core” often forgot what real fighting and killing was like; and converted it into a game. It wasn’t just the rulers who thought this way. Why else do you think the Colosseum is as large as it is? And don’t all of us today consider the murder

Freddie deBoer laments that social media has turned everyone into cops: “Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something,  anything .” While it’s easy to see the problem, it’s hard to think of a way to “draw people away from the crack of social media” (Alan Jacob’s words). Because we are treading on very tricky ground here, namely the freedom of speech. Don’t we already see contradictory stances like this one described by Scott Alexander : “It’s okay for me to say that the President sucks, but  not  okay for you to say that I suck for saying that.” Besides, aren’t there scenarios where “out’ing” a person for their views can be a good thing, muses

In the pre-Internet era, one read the same magazines and newspaper all the time. We exchanged views with our friends and co-workers. Few sought diverse opinions. That’s just human nature. On the Internet, the problem got aggravated because we don’t even realize how sites work, as Shane Parrish says : “Many sites offer personalized content selections, based on our browsing history, age, gender, location, and other data. The result is a flood of articles and posts that support our current opinions and perspectives to ensure that we enjoy what we see.” Search for “British Petroleum” on Google, and it will throw up either stock analysis or environmental articles at the top, depending on your preferences! Eli Pariser calls this tendency of algorithms to dictate what we encounter online as the “filter bubble”. Even when we click on links shared by our friends, we end up in echo chambers. Why? Because our friends’ views usually align with ours… Then there’s the advertising that seem

Did you hear about this apology that a train company made in Japan? “A rail company in Japan has apologised after one of its trains departed 20 seconds early… In a statement, the company said the train had been scheduled to leave at 9:44:40 local time but left at 9:44:20” An apology for being wrong by 20 seconds? Wow! Inevitably this news became the topic of a discussion on the site Slashdot. And as always, user comments on the topic were hilarious. One guy wrote: “The conductor will now commit hara-kiri after apologizing for shaming his family.” He was promptly corrected by another: “That would be seppuku, not harakiri. The two are closely related, but harakiri is just suicide by disembowelment, while seppuku is the ritualized form done to spare others shame.” Who in turn was contradicted: “The two mean the same thing, seppuku is just based on the chinese reading. Same as ninja and shinobi and all that jazz.” The conversation then veered to suicide rates in dif

Uber and Airbnb mark the advent of software companies into the physical world, writes Brad Stone in his book on the two companies, The Upstarts . In the physical world, these companies ran into the treacherous waters of regulations, and political lobbying by established industries. Everyone knows of Uber. Airbnb is short for Airbed ‘n Breakfast, a site that started by offering people a way to rent a room (with an airbed, hence the name) to a stranger for a couple of days (with breakfast). It was started with the aim of allowing people to find accommodation in cities they visited if they couldn’t find a hotel or just wanted a cheaper option, and allowed others to make some money when they had a room to spare or if they were out of town for a few days! Uber, as I explained in an earlier blog , ran into conflicts with existing cab companies over questions on license to operate and certified billing meters. Airbnb ran into conflicts for different reasons: 1)       Was it even

A couple of years back, when my (then) 3-4 year old daughter was learning to count, she used to go “…twenty eight, twenty nine, twenty ten ”. It left me with mixed feelings: an ‘F’ for correctness, an ‘A+’ for logical thinking. Now, at age 6, another such incident. She was being taught the names of the various shapes (rectangles, circles, cubes and the like). Then, the text book called for identification for the shapes on this figure: These were her answers: So she got #4 and #5 wrong. The boring possibility is that she hadn’t internalized the shapes yet. But I think hope that she was trying to factor in the curved bottoms of #4 and #5, in which they can’t really be called triangles. The right answer would then be cone, er, kone. Regardless of what really happened with #4 and #5, I loved the answer she gave for #8: It’s obvious why she called #8 a “face” instead of a “circle”. The right answer is often context sensitive, as we all learn eventually. I never

I’ve never been a fan of reading the classics for many reasons: - Bad memories of such books being rammed down my throat in school (c’mon, system, kids are too young to appreciate or absorb anything from such books); - The English of such books is so old and different from what is used today that it is a pain to make sense of it; - Almost all those books are ambiguous (I know, I know: ambiguity allows you to interpret it in different ways across cultures and ages; but I prefer authors writing what they mean and meaning what they write). Given my views on the subject, I didn’t see Arthur Schopenhauer’s point that we should read the classics because they are old : “It is because people will only read what is the newest instead of what is the best of all ages, that writers remain in the narrow circle of prevailing ideas, and that the age sinks deeper and deeper in its own mire.” Excellent point! Differing, even opposing views are so important to read up: after all, that’s

In recent months, the aura of invincibility around Modi and the BJP seems to be wearing off. As Santosh Desai writes , there are signs of jitteriness in the BJP about the elections in Gujarat, the “effects of demonetisation continue to reverberate through the economy”, GST implementation is having its share of issues, and the “cultural agenda too ends up with too many unhinged statements”. And in this backdrop: “Being on the back foot does not come naturally to Mr Modi and his reactions lack the surefootedness of an earlier time.” So who could rise now in the Opposition? Nitish went to the NDA, the Yadavs are barely standing, and Mamata never grew beyond Bengal, writes Chetan Bhagat. No wonder then that Rahul Gandhi seems to be on the rise, at least on the Net: “There seems to be a new zing in his tweets and statements about the government, particularly PM Modi. It is like someone took boiled daal and gave it a tadka. His lines are spicier (or more entertaining), which in tu

When we jet-ski’ed during our recent holiday in Vizag, we didn’t expect our 6 year-old to do it. After all, it looks scary, and she’d have to do it without either of us with her (it would only be her and the guy driving the jet-ski). And yet, she was persuaded to do it, not because she saw we had fun doing it, but because my wife dangled the carrot of bragging rights with her friends! So off she went. When she returned, I expected her to have that “I did it!” triumphant look and declaration. I could not have been more wrong. Instead, this is what she had to say: 1)       “Did you get a snap of me riding it?” Because her friends wouldn’t believe she’d done it, unless there was a pic to prove it. 2)      “When we go back to Bangalore, you must come down with me. With your phone. So I can show the pics to my friends.” So she could brag. I realized that she’s at that in-between age. Old enough to know that people lie about what they did. And young enough to think that pic

Conclusion of the series based on the book, Saving a Continent . As all the (Western) European nations got together in Paris to identify their collective needs for aid, one of the delegates admitted: “Everybody cheated like hell in Paris. Everybody.” Many asked for far more than what they used to produce before the war! Others “estimated” what they would need in future ! Britain wanted to ensure that nobody used this as a way to leap ahead of Britain. The French were keen that Germany be made largely “pastoral” and suggested “pulling the heavy industrial teeth” of the Germans. Many countries tried to publicly announce their lists as “final”, hoping to embarrass and force the US into agreeing to what the US contemptuously called their “shopping lists”. The Americans retaliated by telling the Europeans bluntly that they abandon their customary “nationalistic approach”, accept some “infringement on their sovereignty” and to come to terms with the fact that “certain basic ch