Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Usually I am not sympathetic to the complaints against the advertisement driven Internet model. Somebody’s got to pay for the service; so what if its via ads? To the common complaint that it incentivizes the site (Facebook, Google etc) to show you content based on the advertiser’s money, surely the site would lose its popularity over time if it kept thrusting content that you didn’t like/care about? But recently I saw a good example of a far more subtle behavior that ads can lead to in what sites show us. While there’s nothing harmful in what I will describe, it does show that the effects do exist. When people plan a trip, they use one of these apps to estimate time of travel: Google Maps, Waze or Apple Maps. The first two are ad driven, but Apple isn’t. Artur Grabowski compared the three apps. Here’s what he found: 1)       Waze’s routes are usually the fastest; Google is mid-way; Apple is the worst (relatively speaking). Nothing surprising so far. 2)      But when it

Circular reasoning may lie at the heart of why all the criticism hurled at Facebook (and to a much lesser extent at Google) doesn’t trigger any change. Fred Turner elaborates by explaining what Facebook and Google believe in… truly: “It started with, “Don't be evil.” So then the question became, “Okay, what's good?” Well, information is good. Information empowers people. So providing information is good. Okay, great. Who provides information? Oh, right: Google provides information. So you end up in this loop where what's good for people is what's good for Google, and vice versa.” Replace “information” with “connecting people” above, and you get Facebook. Turner has a pretty good description of the current “ethics of engineering”: “The ethics of engineering are an ethics of: Does it work? If you make something that works, you’ve done the ethical thing. It’s up to other people to figure out the social mission for your object.” But today we increasingly see

A year or so back, we started subscribing to the Nat Geo Kids magazine for our (now) 6 year-old daughter. As the thrill of finding mail bearing her name wore off, so too did her interest in the magazine. Until it got revived recently. Either the interest is genuine or it’s because she’s now started taking a magazine to school of late. Apparently, reading (in the bus) is what the cool kids do nowadays! Talking of the stuff that she reads (or that is read to her) reminds me… One time, I was reading to her about the Titanic . It was called the “unsinkable ship”, I told her. “Hmmmph”, came the contemptuous snort. I dismissed it as the know-it-all smugness of the kid who’d seen the movie Titanic . But then she said something that made me wonder if she knew something deeper: “Anything can be made to sink”, she announced. Exactly, kiddo, this can-sink attitude is why the Allies were able to sink the German flagship of war, the Bismarc k … Then there was this Geronimo Stilton

As Facebook got caught in (yet another) storm over privacy, this time over a firm called Cambridge Analytica, we have the usual polarized views being blared out: -          Was the Facebook data leaked? Or misused? -          Did it contribute to Trump’s win (and Brexit)? -          How much is Facebook to blame? To answer those questions, we should see what exactly happened. Cambridge Analytica is a data analytics firm. Depending on your political views, writes Bryan Clark , it was: “either integral to the Brexit leave campaign and Donald Trump’s surprise presidential victory, or selling snake oil that both parties (and others) willfully swallowed.” The firm was created by an American billionaire, Robert Mercer, a staunch Republican, to mine data for political purposes. If you are horrified, remember that Facebook, Google and Amazon target ads at you based on your preferences. So where does one draw a moral line? What should be the criteria? How the firm got its

Counter-factual history is a fancy term for playing “What if?” with history: What if the Nazis had won World War II? What if the USSR had won the Cold War? And so on. Niall Ferguson wrote a book on many such counter-factual scenarios. My reaction to all this? C’mon, the world is too complex. If you start your counter-factual with Hitler winning World War II, it can branch in a million different ways from that point onwards . As a character in the movie, The Counselor , said: “Actions create consequences which produce new worlds, and they're all different.” You just picked one branch; what about the others? How do you “know” which branch to pick? Another question I have is Why? Why come up with counter-factuals? What’s the point? Ferguson wrote that they help refute the “idea that events are in some way preprogrammed, so that what was, had to be.” C’mon, I thought: who believes history has a direction, other than Marxists? And hasn’t Marx lost all credibility any

Why does capitalism produce such economic wonders while communism flops miserably on the same front? Note I just asked about the economic aspects, not the political side of things. I’ll pre-empt the wrongly cited counter-example: China. Sorry, but China is not a communist country in economic terms. Rory Sutherland dismisses efficiency as the critical difference between the two systems. Rather, he says: “Truly free markets trade efficiency for a costly process of market-tested innovation heavily reliant on dumb luck. The reason this inefficient process is necessary is that, though we pretend otherwise, no one knows anything about anything: most of the achievements of consumer capitalism were never planned; they are explicable only in retrospect, if at all.” And in contrast, he says: “The reason to avoid communism is not because it is inefficient, but because it tries to be too intelligent.” Too intelligent? Sutherland elaborates that communism thinks it knows what is ne

The investment bank, Goldman Sachs, draws its share of hatred and revulsion. Mostly (in)famously, it was described thus by Matt Taibbi : “The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” A very graphic description indeed! Like pretty much every other financial entity in the US, Goldman too received bailout money. Which, of course, added to the fury. It didn’t help that its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, made his (in)famous comment to a reporter while coming out a government hearing on the financial crisis saying that he was “off to do God’s work”. Outrageous though it sounds, this was Blankfein’s version of the context in which he made the remark, as described in William D. Cohan’s book, Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came To Rule The World : “So I walked out and I was talking to a reporter, and the questions were running along the lines of ‘Ho

Summer’s here and we ordered ice cream over the Net. When it arrived, my 6 year-old was thrilled to find not just the one box we’d ordered but two boxes. How come, she wondered. And then she saw the caption on the box saying, “Buy one, get one free”. Aha, she now knew why Christmas had come early. Then she got greedy. So if we’d ordered two boxes, we’d have gotten four boxes, right? And if we ordered three, we’d get six?... Her enthusiasm in applying the multiplication table of 2 was in such stark contrast with her unhappiness in having to recite the same table while studying. Continuing in that vein, she then announced, “If you’d ordered uncountable ice creams, we’d have gotten twice the number of uncountable ice creams”. And that’s how she got her first glimpse of infinity! Ok, kiddo, looks like you’ve mastered the tables, so it’s time to move onto the Cantor infinities , the mind-blowing concept that there are multiple infinities and some infinities are larger tha

The most famous Latin name for a species must surely be “Tyrannosaurus rex”. Or just T.rex , as all dino fans know it so fondly. Recently I learnt that the naming convention for species (called “binomial nomenclature” ) has 2 parts: -          The first part is the genus; ( I have no clue what a genus means! ) -          The second identifies the species within the genus. Now keep in mind that we came up with this convention a couple of centuries back. And therefore, the genus was being decided based on appearance and visible (or inferable) attributes of the specimen. Today, writes Svante Pääbo in his excellent book, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes , we can study the DNA of a specimen to know which species shared ancestors, and which ones are ancestors of which others. And so often we find that seemingly unrelated species shared common ancestors, or one was an ancestor of the other, even though they may have no visible similarities! As you can imagine, this ne

During my college days, there used to magazines like Voice & Data . Today, everything is Data. Thanks to the rise of the smartphone, the purpose of the phone has changed, as Thomas Ricker wrote in this awesome article : “With the invention of smartphones, the "phone" is just another communications app. One that is quickly being demoted from the favorites bar. Hell, most modern phone reviews don’t even bother discussing call reception.” Ian Bogost wrote this great article on why this transition happened: it’s not just a social phenomenon, it’s also technological! Mobile, being wireless, meant that “signal strength, traffic, and interference can make calls difficult or impossible”. We have come to accept that to a point where “phone calls (are) synonymous with unreliability”! In that unreliable world came all the messaging apps: being “asynchronous, a slow or failed message feels like less of a failure”, says Bogost. Then there’s the historical choice that tel

I was talking to this Christian friend of mine and the conversation turned to Biblical prophecies. He talked about the impending Armageddon. As he told me jokingly, that’s not Armageddon as in the movie; rather it’s Armageddon as in “the last battle between good and evil before the Day of Judgement”. Ever the detail oriented one, I asked, “What’s the date for that?” As you might expect, he had no answer to that question. Instead, he said it would happen right when Israel was surrounded by everyone else in the world (not just the Islamic world). But that doesn’t give me a date either, does it? To me, this sounds like the “turtles all the way down” answer! This unwillingness to give a specific date is, of course, not just limited to religious folks. Seth Godin avoided a date when he talked about believing in yourself and moving forward with what you believe to be right: “Sooner or later, your work speaks for itself.” Worst of all, though, are the economists and financ

There was this one time when my dad and I wondered who had come up with a particular equation in maths. The sources Google pointed to didn’t have a conclusive answer. It seemed to be the accepted practice to attribute the equation to one particular individual because he had been working on many related topics and seemed the most likely candidate, not because there was any record of him having actually found it! My dad remarked that the tendency to glorify the discoverer is just a human quirk, and that truly glorious things can’t have ownership associated with them. But the issue here isn’t about ownership, it’s about credit. One of the most famous battles over discovery is the one between Newton and Leibniz over who discovered calculus. It was a bitterly contested topic, with no quarters given. The issue gets even more muddied because Newton didn’t publish what he came up with for 20 years! Does it count if you didn’t show it to anybody for decades? Or as you find with Colum

There was this time a few years back when my then 3 or 4 year old daughter wanted to apply nail polish on me. Reluctantly, I gave in but told her it could only be on the toe nails. Those I could cover with socks, I reasoned. And they’d go away with enough scrubbing or soap, I thought. Boy, it was one of the worst decisions I made. It was a nightmare having to wear socks every time I went out in peak summer. And nail polish doesn’t come off easily, I realized too late. Ever since, I’ve said No to pretty much every girl-y nonsense she’s wanted to try on me. Mostly I’ve been able to stand my ground, and the few exceptions have been plain sailing compared to that nail polish fiasco. I assumed the next big battles will happen only when she’s a teenager. Like she disapproving of how I dress. Or how I look. So I have peace on this front for a long time to come: after all, she’s only 6 now. They say kids learn things/do things faster and earlier these days. Apparently trying to c