Viswanathan K's Thoughts

When I see the shell shocked reaction of traditional media to the rise of social media as the way to voice and influence opinions, it reminds me of these lines by Scott Alexander : “People very reasonably ask – hey, I notice my side kind of controls all of this stuff, the situation is actually asymmetrical, they have no way of retaliating, maybe we should just grind our enemies beneath our boots this one time. And then when it turns out that the enemies can just leave and start their own institutions, with horrendous results for everybody, the cry goes up “Wait, that’s unfair! Nobody ever said you could do that!” Another trend driving this transition is what Freddie deBoer cites : “Conservatives have been arguing for years that liberals essentially want to write them out of shared cultural and intellectual spaces altogether.” (Replace “conservatives” and “liberals” with the relevant words from your context). And the reaction of traditional media that is being marginaliz...

In his book Imagining India , former Infosys CEO, Nandan Nilekani calls English in India the “Phoenix Tongue”, subtitled “The Rise, Fall and Rise of English”! Britain introduced English in India to cut administrative and judicial costs for the East India Company by having the locals do those jobs! It took Macaulay to translate this into reality. (In)famously he declared: “We must… form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions we govern – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” As can be expected, many Indians resented the imposition of a foreign language. But others saw it as an opportunity for a job and social advancement. Reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy backed the move saying it would be a “tongue that would exist outside the control of the native, caste- and religious-based elite”. English exposed Indians to “Western ideas of nationalism, liberty and freedom”, writes Nilekani. Qualifie...

Often, to understand the events of a period, one has to be given context: what was the value system of the day? What was taken as obviously true? Or the “right” thing to be doing? That’s obvious; but it came as a shock to me to see that it can be true even when analyzing seemingly recent events. Like the infamous sterilization drive of Sanjay Gandhi & Co. In his book Imagining India , former Infosys CEO, Nandan Nilekani says that as recently as the mid-twentieth century, even the West was fearful of the Malthusian population bomb, namely that population would grow much faster than food supply. India and China were watched with the utmost fear on this front. In that age, sterilization of the unfit and termination of “defective” babies were considered reasonable even in the West. Is it really a surprise then that both Sanjay Gandhi in India and the Chinese government enforced population control? Hell, as recently as 1983, Indira Gandhi and China’s family planning minister recei...

I have heard how all kids these days get awards at almost any event the school organizes. I disapprove. Strongly. Very strongly. How is it OK to tell every kid that they are just as good as everyone else? At anything they try? This seems to be a weird practice we have imported from the West of late (I don’t remember anyone awarding awards to everyone when I was a kid). And so I read with interest Molly Knefel’s article titled Trophy Season . She would explain the West’s justification for this practice. Or so I hoped. She has 2 reasons: 1)       She says that branding a kid a “winner” or a “loser” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; and so we should avoid those terms by awarding everyone. But that makes no sense at all. A kid doesn’t do better because he is called a winner . Rather, he is called a winner because he did better than the rest . How insane does one have to be to not get that? 2)      The other reason is only slightly...

Albert Einstein once said about wars: “To my mind to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.” Few would go that far. In war, it is kill or be killed. If that’s not an existential choice, what is? Besides, some wars are truly dharma yudh ’s. The loss of life apart, wars usually have a huge economic cost, for both the victor and the loser. And as former US President James Madison wrote in “Political Observations”, war is the enemy “most to be dreaded” when it comes to civil liberties: “In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied…(all that inevitably leads to) opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both.” And so Madison concludes: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” Then there’s the issue that wars create the “merchants of death”, what...

A clerk in New Delhi when told that the visitor was from the San Francisco Bay Area replied, “Oh that is the center of the universe”! When asked why, he said: “Because the center of the universe is wherever there is the least resistance to new ideas.” If that didn’t make sense, let me explain. The Bay Area stretches from San Francisco to San Jose. Or to put it differently, it is Silicon Valley. America produces more new ideas than any other country. And within America, it’s Silicon Valley. Kind of like fractal geometry, huh?! Kelly then explores why that is the case. If you stick to more recent history, the answer usually revolves around Stanford University (They fund companies of their alumni within this area since it is close to the university; their students are very smart; ergo…and then it becomes a virtuous cycle of success attracting more braniacs…). Kelly though goes much farther back and gives J. S. Holliday’s take on it: “(J. S. Holliday) argues that it began...

We know that genetic changes are transmitted “vertically”, i.e., from parent to child. But can genes be transmitted “horizontally”, i.e., between two unrelated strangers? Even better (or creepier), can genes be transmitted “horizontally” across species ? Most of our myths, world over, have imagined such chimeras, by cutting and pasting parts of different species. Sometimes they are monsters: think of the half-bull, half-man Minotaur of the Greeks. Sometimes they are cute: think mermaids. At other times, they’re God’s way of finding a way around a boon granted to an evil rakshasa : think Narasimha avatar. Siddhartha Mukherjee, in his terrific book The Gene , says this question was explored in that “reliable barometer of American anxieties and fantasies – comic strips”! When a radioactive spider bit Peter Parker: “The spider’s mutant genes are transmitted to Parker’s body presumably by horizontal transfer… thus endowing Parker with “agile and proportionate strength of an arac...

When I thought of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I (obviously) thought of it as an engineer (disorder, entropy, blah blah). But no more. Thanks to this amusing and profound take by Steven Pinker, a non-science guy, who listed that very law as the scientific term/concept that deserves to be known widely ! So what makes the Second Law worth knowing? Pinker points out the psychological benefits of knowing this law! “The Second Law defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order. An underappreciation of the inherent tendency toward disorder, and a failure to appreciate the precious niches of order we carve out, are a major source of human folly.” The Second Law answers or rather, flips the why-poverty question on its head: “Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind. Matter ...

I remember this text from my school book that described the sinking of the Titanic . From what little I remember, it seemed to be more about the human angle of the sinking (remember, this was before everyone knew the story thanks to Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet) than the why’s behind the sinking. The only “why” my school book mentioned was the obvious one: the collision with the iceberg. But as anyone who has watched Air Craft Investigations can tell you, such accidents never involve just one cause. It is usually a succession of multiple events, mistakes and bad luck that collectively results in disaster. Like this narrative . The events it mentions include there being more icebergs than usual; the ship going too fast since the captain wanted to beat the record; the ignoring of warnings that icebergs lay in the area; the steersman turned the ship in the wrong direction (the direction to turn the “rudder” is the opposite for sail ships and steam ships; and the world...

In his highly informative book, The Most Powerful Idea in the World , on steam and how it shaped the Industrial Revolution, William Rosen made an interesting point about a long-debunked theory of heat. Called the phlogiston theory, it said that anything hot had more of something inside it – the eponymous phlogiston – that would get released as it cooled. The theory did seem to explain why what was left of the wood after burning (ashes) weighed less than the wood itself: because the phlogiston would have been released. But other observable phenomenon contradicted the theory: -          Some substances (e.g. magnesium) became heavier after being burnt, contrary to what the theory predicted. -          Other substances didn’t change weight even if they cooled e.g. a hot iron bar put in water weighed the same after it had cooled and was taken out of the water. Here’s the part about the theory that ...

Back in 2011, when the New York Times decided to start charging for access to its online content, everyone wondered: how could that possibly work? If most other news sites were free, who would pay for this one site alone? Another issue comes from behavioral economics, the branch of economics that is based on the obvious fact that humans aren’t rational most of the time. Let Dan Ariely explain the problem of “anchors” : “The main problem of this approach is that over the years of free access, the New York Times has trained its readers for years that the right price (or the Anchor) is $0 – and since this is the starting point it is very hard to change it.” So then was the New York Times doomed to fail? Not necessarily, said Ariely: “The trick with anchoring is that although we are not willing to pay more for the same thing, we are willing to pay more for different things.  What this means is that one approach that the New York Times could take is to present us with a new ex...

During the 9/11 attacks, one of the hijacked planes, Flight 93, failed to achieve its mission. Why? Because the passengers, having gotten wind of what had been done with the other planes, charged into the cockpit and brought down the plane. While Trump and Clinton were still campaigning last year, one blogger wrote wrote that Clinton would take the country “off a cliff”. Therefore, he urged : “2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die.” Now, of course, the boot is on the other foot. Anti-Trump campaigns are based on the same fear of Trump destroying “everything”. Everything? , snorts Alan Jacobs. He rightly calls out the rampant exaggeration on both sides: “This absolutizing of fright reminds me of the expanding scope of disasters in superhero comics and movies: People will die! — no wait, a  whole city  will be destroyed! — A city? Small stuff. The  planet  will be vaporized! — A mere planet? The  universe  will disappear in...