Viswanathan K's Thoughts

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 goo...

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 ...

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...

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)    ...

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 i...

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 ...

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...

Continuation of the series based on the book, Saving a Continent . The Americans began to believe that the Soviet strategy on Europe was to smile and talk, but drag things on until Europe collapsed economically, at which point communists backed by Stalin would take power. So the US concluded that they had to act unilaterally. They told the French and British that they should setup a “European community” that would identify its economic needs collectively (America couldn’t possibly find out each country’s needs individually) and then “ask” for that amount from the US. As an incentive, the US showed the stick: if they couldn’t group Europe together, then the US would just go and make “Germany a self-supporting competitor to the neighboring countries of Europe”! The British were pragmatic and agreed, but wondered if American money would then flow into Eastern Europe, an area under Soviet control. So the US suggested adding conditions for entry into the European community that w...

History always ignores peacetime leaders and glorifies or vilifies wartime leaders. And yet, as this great book, Saving a Continent shows, peacetime leaders can often have a much bigger impact on history. The book is about the Marshall Plan, the American plan to rebuild World War II-torn Europe. The backdrop to all this involved some things I knew, and others that I didn’t: -          All of Europe, Western and Eastern, was in shambles in 1945. -          Only America remained untouched, because of its geographical isolation. -          The Soviet Union was not considered an enemy. -          Many European countries, even France and Italy, had communists in varying degrees of power via coalitions with democratic parties. -          America was isolationist by nature at the ...

We like to believe that we are unique, that we know ourselves better than almost everybody else (except maybe a spouse or parent or very close friend). Oliver Burkeman says we are wrong in that belief: “You have a huge amount of detailed information about your preferences and past experiences. But it also gives you overconfidence in your judgments; an emotional resistance to facing certain awkward facts; and an outsized sense of your uniqueness and importance.” And so: “Alarmingly often, when you’re faced with a big decision, you’re better off trusting the judgment of a friend – or even a stranger – than your own.” Friends I can understand. But strangers? The strangers part is more relevant when it comes to long term decisions like getting married or having kids. Since those would be new experiences, you really have no idea how you’ll respond to them. There is no past behavior to look at! “It starts to look as if the best way to make a big decision might   not ...

If you already know what the term “grammar Nazi” means, feel free to skip the rest of this paragraph.  Here is how Urban Dictionary defines it: 1)       “A person who believes proper grammar (and spelling) should be used by everyone whenever possible”; 2)      “One who uses proper grammar and spelling to subtly mock or deride those who do not; an exhibitor of grammatical superiority”. Ok, now to the topic of the blog. As I mentioned some time back, my 6 year-old daughter has taken a liking to Calvin and Hobbes. Recently, I was reading her this strip where Calvin gets a Valentine card from Susie. Like all boys that age (and only that age), Calvin was horrified. Predictably then, Hobbes teased him: I had to sing (yes, sing, not just read) Hobbes’ song to my kid. Again and again. And I felt exactly like Calvin’s dad from a different strip: Finally, I switched off the light, tucked her in and waited for her to...

Uber is the posterchild for all kinds of criticism, some valid and others not. But the existing cab systems have themselves to blame for the rise of Uber too: -          Artificial constraints on the number of cabs put by regulations; -          Cab fleet owners didn’t care about their drivers; -          Cab drivers didn’t care about their passengers, because where was the repeat business with any particular driver? -          No guarantees of even a booked cab even showing up; -          Next to impossible to find a cab on the fly when you wanted it. Software companies had tried to work with the cab companies to fix these problems. They never got far, as Brad Stone explains in his book, Upstarts : “No technology could solve for the fact that there was resistance among ...

I knew Edgar Allan Poe to be a writer. But I didn’t know he even wrote sonnets. The lines from one of his sonnets even became famous! Calling science a “cold philosophy”, his sonnet feared science would “conquer all mysteries by rule and line” and “unweave a rainbow”. Richard Dawkins used that phrase as the title of one of his books, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder . He argued that just as some felt that poetry and art exalted them to new levels, so did science for another set of people: “The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver.” Richard Feynman made the same point in a BBC interview. He talked about an artist friend of his who said when looking at a beautiful flower “you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing”.    Feynman disagreed: ...