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 ha...

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...

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...