Viswanathan K's Thoughts

How do you teach a kid to think logically? After all, logical thinking cuts across disciplines. It doesn’t fit neatly into any particular subject at school… I’ve always felt civics would be a great subject to teach kids to think logically. Is a Presidential system better? Or is the Westminister model better? Or is there a combo of the two that would be better than either? What’s the right tenure for a head of state? This is the kind of topic that can lead to debates and discussions, which if moderated well, can force kids to understand the pros and cons of different systems, and to dig up how countries have fared under the different systems. And why compromises are made in deciding a form of government. Economics is another candidate. Are monopolies bad by definition ? Or is a monopoly bad only when it abuses its monopoly status ? Is socialism sustainable in the long term? How is socialism tied to population demographics? But ok, civics and economics come a bit later in a

Why is the language of science English? I thought the answer to that question was the same as to why the language of the world is English: because the British ruled most of the planet. But that answer’s not true for science, argues Michael Gordin, a historian of science, in his book, Scientific Babel . Gordin points out how recently English took over the scientific world: “If you look around the world in 1900, and someone told you, 'Guess what the universal language of science will be in the year 2000', you would first of all laugh at them. It was obvious that no one language would be the language of science, but a mixture of French, German and English would be the right answer.” That actually makes sense. Sure, the British ruled the world, but the scientists were all in Europe, an area not exactly under British control! So why then has English become the dominant language of science since 1900? The short answer: the two World Wars. Now for the longer version.

A company having outsized ambitions is something you laugh at… until it comes true. Think of Steve Jobs’ intention to make a “dent in the universe”: laughable until he invented the iPhone and the smartphone market. Or take Google’s mission statement to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”. But at least one could argue that was declared by its founders when they were still college kids, an age when it’s the norm to be hyper-ambitious and unrealistic! Or look at Amazon. Back in 1997 when the Internet was just getting started, Amazon started off as a book retailer. And yet, even back then, their declared mission made clear their outsized ambitions: “Amazon.com’s objective is to be the leading online retailer of information-based products and services, with an initial focus on books .” Within a few years after 1997, this was their updated mission statement: “Our vision is to be earth’s most customer centric company; to build a

As software and AI increasingly replace humans in more and more jobs, how far is it before the CEO of a company too is replaced by algorithms? Just two years back, Frank Pasquale wrote that “automation of the top management functions at firms like Uber and AirBnB would be “trivially easy.” Nicholas Carr wonders whether with the resignation (ouster?) of Uber CEO, Travis Kalanick, Uber’s shareholders now have that opportunity: “Uber and its investors have a perfect opportunity to disrupt the executive suite, and indeed the entire history of management, by using software to run the company.” But first, why is Uber such a good candidate for such an idea? Says Carr: “A fundamentally numerical company, constituted mainly of software, Uber is the perfect test bed for the robot CEO. And since its staff includes exceptionally talented programmers, it already has the skill needed to gin up the algorithms necessary to do the work Kalanick and his lieutenants did.” But the CEO

Alan Jacobs banned laptops (and other internet-enabled devices) from his class. His reason was that his students were getting distracted. My instinctive reaction was to disagree with him: shouldn't he accept the reality of the ubiquitous connected device and adapt his teaching to align with them? Who refers to a book after college anyway (except for ultra-specialized topics)? Don't we just dip into the perfect recall of Google? Then recently, at work, I found it better to learn a new field (pneumatics and mechanical engineering) by taking notes on a book than on my laptop. The laptop was distracting me with every new mail and message. Clay Shirky sums it up perfectly: “Multi-tasking is cognitively exhausting.” On the other hand, aren't many teachers bad at teaching? Did any of us ever learn anything from those teachers even in the pre-connected-device-in-every-pocket era? But Shirky brings out a point I hadn't realized (even though it was right under my nos

Here is how Wikipedia describes the tooth fairy : “The tooth fairy is a fantasy figure of early childhood. The  folklore  states that when children lose one of their baby teeth, they should place it underneath their pillow and the tooth fairy will visit while they sleep, replacing the lost tooth with a small payment.” Wikipedia adds this is mostly a practice of the English speaking world. And we, the urban, Westernized middle class are a part of that group... My 5 year old daughter has been wanting her first tooth to fall for some time. No, not because of the prospect of goodies from the tooth fairy. Rather, it’s because most of her friends have lost theirs. And show off the gaps in their teeth like they’ve passed some rite of passage! Plus, of course, they mock the ones who haven’t lost theirs as being… babies. Yeah, I know, kids are mean. Anyways, kids can give it back as good as they get. How dumb do you have to be to believe in such things, my daughter would respond.

During her summer holidays, I tried teaching carryover and borrowing (in maths) to my daughter. Like everyone else, she picked up carryover easily. But borrowing proved a harder nut to crack (no surprise there either). I’d be sitting next to her as she practiced and at one point, it looked like she had learnt borrowing too. A couple of days later, I wrote down a couple of subtraction questions and stepped away to attend to a few other things. When I returned, I found she had made many mistakes in subtraction/borrowing. What had happened? How could she have forgotten given that she was practicing every day? Then I remembered this horse called Clever Hans. In the late 19 th century, Wilhelm Von Osten started teaching his horse to count by tapping his hooves. Amazingly, the horse could soon do many maths problems, including fractions, multiplication, even working out dates! Sure, he wasn’t always right, but the accuracy rate was high enough for Germany’s board of education to take

The Nobel Prize. We know the one for Peace is political: Why else would Gandhi not win it while Obama won it right after assuming office the first time ?! The one for Literature is obviously subjective: everyone has their own taste and who can possibly compare literature across languages? That leaves the science prizes. Surely they must be less controversial. But no, even the Physics prizes has had its share of craziness. Like Einstein never winning it for Relativity! And it gets worse. Here’s that story. As quantum theory was evolving, Werner Heisenberg came up with matrix mathematics to describe it. Ironically, he didn’t even know there was such a branch of maths! But one of his colleagues, Max Born, did know about matrices and worked with his colleague, Pascual Jordan, to develop the theory further. Working independently, Paul Dirac reworked the entire theory using another branch of maths developed by William Hamilton! Dirac’s way was a lot easier to use and even Heisenb

As the father of a kid still small enough to be molded, I am very keen that she develop what is called “critical thinking” these days. What’s that? Let Carl Hendrick explain the term : “The aim is to equip students with a set of general problem-solving approaches that can be applied to any given domain.” But Hendrick feels that teaching any such “general” techniques or skills is an impossible goal. Why? “To be good in a specific domain you need to know a lot about it: it’s not easy to translate those skills to other areas… it cannot be detached from context.” Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb laments about this “domain dependence” in his book, Antifragile : “They get it in the classroom, but not in the more complicated texture of the street… We are all handicapped, unable to recognize the same idea when it is presented in a different context.” So is that it then? Is there no hope? Hendrick suggests we teach subject specific (rather than generic) critical thinking skill

When Indians like us take our kids to school the first time, we worry whether our kids will pick up English fast enough . The need and benefits of knowing English, other than their mother tongue, is obvious. That’s not the case with Americans. Except if they are married to foreigners. Like Robert Lane Greene, who is married to a Finnish woman, wants to “raise a genuine bilingual” . It was interesting to read his take on the whole topic since for us, the benefit of knowing English is obvious, whereas for them, the benefit of knowing anything other than English is, well, questionable. But we’ll get back to the benefits later. Let’s start with the “how to” part. Lane can think of two strategies in case of parents, who between themselves, know multiple languages well: “one parent, one language”, and “one language at home, the other outside”. Most Indians follow one or both patterns while raising our genuine bilinguals. And yet I wasn’t aware of this problem: “Bilinguals hit

I love that song with the line, “Everybody wants to rule the world”. In Silicon Valley, the mantra is different, as annunciated in a Huffington Post ad that said: “Don’t just take your place at the top of the world. Change the world.” Changing the world: that’s Silicon Valley’s mantra. Ever since Steve Jobs famously asked the CEO of Pepsi whom he was trying to recruit: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” Some of that confidence/ arrogance is justified. As Heather Havrilesky wrote : “Today the term "information superhighway" no longer feels like hyperbole.” At other times, though, that mantra does seem like hyperbole, as exemplified the time a character in the serial Silicon Valley said: “Because if we can make your audio and video files smaller, we can make your cancer smaller, and hunger smaller, and AIDS.” On the other hand, as Robert Pogue Harrison wrote , hasn’t Silicon Valle

The Deccan Herald called the award to Major Gogoi, the man who tied a (alleged) protestor to his jeep and used him as a human shield, as “wrong and perverse" . Why? Because, they say, the army was “rewarding a person for an egregious crime he has committed”. It went on to add that all “right-thinking people have condemned it”. This is a ridiculous argument: who decides which set of people are called “right-thinking people”? In any case, how did they figure out what those “right-thinking people” feel anyway? At least Santosh Desai’s argument was better. He said it’s not fair to criticize Major Gogoi because he had to make a decision in real time, in a situation with no clear ground rules. What do his detractors expect, asks Desai. That he should have opened fire on the protestors? Or that he should have just gotten pelted with stones by the protestors? After all, says Desai: “Stones are neither harmless nor are they lethal, at least in most cases- a barrage of stones can c

William Poundstone started off his book Fortune’s Formula in the age before live transmission of sports and before long distance phone calls. That meant there was a few minutes delay between the time a race at the racetrack got over and the times the bookies got to know the outcome. In theory, says Poundstone: “A customer who learned the winner before the bookmakers did could place bets on a horse that had already won.” Of course, it worked the other way too: a bookmaker who knew the result before others would be quite happy to accept bets on a horse that he knew had lost! A man named John Payne spotted this opportunity and started a wire service to speed up the communication of race results to anyone who’d pay for it: “Payne stationed an employee at the local racetrack. The instant a horse crossed the finish line, the employee used a hand mirror to flash the winner, in code, to another employee in a nearby tall building. This employee telegraphed the results.” In the pres