Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In her awesome book, Being Wrong , Kathryn Schulz writes: “When we make mistakes, we shrug and say we are human. As bats are batty and slugs are sluggish, our own species is synonymous with screwing up.” Sure, you knew that already, and yet: “There is no experience of being wrong. There is an experience of realizing that we are wrong, of course… Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Error: we can be wrong, or we can know it, but we can’t do both at the same time.” Take our beliefs. Not just religious or political beliefs, but nearly every kind of belief we hold: “Our beliefs often seem to us not so much constructed as reflected, as if our minds were simply mirror in which the truth of the world passively appeared.” And that is exactly what leads to, well, errors: “Believing something on the basis of messy, sparse, limited information really is how we err.” Once we have a belief, we then only notice the data that supports it: “Looking for counterevidence...

A while back, I’d written this blog on how the scheme called Amazon Prime came about. I found a very interesting use of that very scheme (from Amazon’s perspective) in Scott Galloway’s The Four , a book on the fastest growing tech companies (Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google). In the age of the Internet, customer loyalty to brands has been steadily eroding. People tend to search for what they want and don’t care about the brand, something that leaves retailers at the “mercy of Google and disloyal consumers”, writes Galloway. To which this is Amazon’s response, especially in the US: “(Amazon) via pricing and exclusive content and products, is asking people to either join Amazon Prime or leave.” Why? “Prime members represent recurring revenue, loyalty and annual purchases.” But if you thought Amazon is the knight in shining armour for brands, you could not be more wrong! You must have heard of Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant. Named after the famous library in Alexandri...

Yet another round of Catholic priests who either abused children or ignored allegations of such child abuse. This time there even seems to be evidence of Pope Francis having his hands dirty in “rehabilitating” one such tainted Cardinal. Inevitably we hear a few (naïve) people ask how Francis can survive this. The same question arises in the US as more and more of Donald Trump’s top guys get implicated in one thing after another. Surely Trump will get impeached now, they say (hope?). Such people seem to still be living in a time that Santosh Desai describes below: “We have over the centuries, successfully built institutions that help manufacture collective trust. The judiciary, media, bureaucracy, academia- these were among several institutions that we reposed our faith in to act on our behalf. We believed in these institutions.” But now is a different time, a time where “attributing motives to institutions” is the norm. And with that, out goes their credibility: “One ‘s ...

Tech blogger, Ben Thompson, wrote this great blog on the key difference between books and blogs (Beyond the obvious one: size): “A book, by necessity, is a finished object.” Which is perfectly ok in case of say, novels. But on almost any serious topic, as Robert Pirsig wrote in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : “The trouble is that essays (or books) always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn’t the way it ever is. People should see that it’s never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It’s never been anything else, ever, but you can’t get that across in an essay.” A blog, on the other hand, is not a manuscript. Rather, Thompson says it is an “intellectual exploration directly and on an ongoing basis”: “While books remained a fantastic medium for stories, both fiction and non, blogs were not only good enough, they were actually better for ideas closely tied to a world changing far mo...

In this awesome article , Jean-Baptiste “JBQ” Quéru asks a seemingly simple question: “You just went to the Google home page. Simple, isn't it? What just actually happened?” A whole lot of technologies came together, actually! There’s the browser, which uses protocols like HTTP and HTML. Don’t know how those work? Let’s move on. Then there’s the networking stuff like DNS, TCP, IP and Wifi. Don’t know them either? Ok, how about the PC/tablet/phone on which you viewed it: do you understand how an operating system, a graphics driver or screen painter works? I didn’t think so. But we never worry about all that, because as Quéru says: “For non-technologists, this is all a black box. That is a great success of technology: all those layers of complexity are entirely hidden and people can use them without even knowing that they exist at all.” Of course, many do try to learn (at least parts of things). It is said that we try to understand new stuff that is complicated by using ...

Every now and then you read a point of view that you completely disagree with. I had just such an experience while reading the stance on parenting of a 2 nd generation Asian-American, Ryan Park. He had followed the stereotype course of most Asian children: “excelled in school”, went to a top college (Harvard Law School), and had a well-paying job (lawyer). But the stereotype “immigrant overachiever” says he doesn’t want to be a “tiger parent” to his daughters. Park has decided to become a heretic, to abandon the religion of his ancestors: “a near-religious devotion to education as the key to social mobility”. He doesn’t intend to follow the “traditional Asian parenting model” of “imposing pain now to reap meritocratic rewards later”, to churn out “academic gladiators”. Like I said, I absolutely do not subscribe to Park’s view on academics. In case you are feeling sorry for my daughter, let me refresh your memory on what kids do to their parents via some Game of Throne...

We try to learn from history. From decisions made in the past, both by us as well as by others. The assumption is that such learnings would help us the next time around we are faced with a similar decision. But is that really true? No matter what the lesson we learnt or how well we internalize that learning, isn’t Shane Parrish right in pointing out the risk with that approach, if we’re not first checking whether any learnings from a particular scenario are applicable later on: “We look to models of success — be they companies, prescriptions, or people and we attempt to blindly copy them without understanding the role of skill versus luck, the ecosystem in which they thrive, or why they work.” So why do people still read biographies of successful people (and companies) in the hope of learning rather than just knowing ? Peter Thiel’s answer in his book, Zero to One : “It’s easier to copy a model than to make something new.” Just because that hurt doesn’t make it false. ...

Did you think that “fake news” arose in the Age of Social Media? That the transition to the “post-truth” world happened only recently? That the tendency accelerated with Putin, Trump and the rise of right wing? Wrong, writes Yuval Noah Harari, in his forthcoming book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Wiping out or creating countries to suit one’s agenda is an age old tactic. In 1931, Japan created a fake country called Manchukuo to justify its aggression against China. China in turn denies the existence of Tibet. Britain called Australia “nobody’s land” and set about occupying it. The Zionists called Palestine “a land without a people”. “In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions.” And no, continues Harari, it isn’t only in politics we do this: “We have zero scientific evidence that Eve was tempted by the serpent, that the souls of all infidels burn in h...

Like adults, kids become pattern seekers. It’s a good evolutionary technique to try and understand what’s happening (or going to happen) in the world around us. Sure, it is not fool proof, but it works enough times to be considered useful. This kids’ book titled Why? used that pattern seeking tendency to amusing effect: 1)       Why do zebras have stripes? Camouflage. 2)      Why do leopards, jaguars and cheetahs have spots? Camouflage. 3)      Can animals change their spots? Yes, arctic fox (brown fur in summer to white fur in winter); octopus and squid (they can change to look like rocks or coral). Why? Camouflage. 4)      Why do polar bears have white fur? Camouflage. 5)      Why are flamingos pink? I am guessing you, like my daughter, answered with a weary get-on-with-it “Camouflage” to the last question. Unlike my daughter though, I am also guessing you did n...

We’re told that it’s a dog eat dog world out there. Winner takes all. To the winner go the spoils. Except that, as Seth Godin so wisely wrote : “Some things are races, but not many.” Knowing what is or what isn’t a race is key because how you go about them changes dramatically, as Godin says: “A race is a competition in which the point is to win. You're not supposed to enjoy the ride, learn anything or make your community better. You're supposed to win.” In a different blog , Godin points out a related tendency to rank things: “What's the best college in the US? What about the best car? Best stereo speakers? Best pizza?” We know the right answer is that it varies based on which criteria matter more to each of us. And yet we always seek out those “forced” rankings: “Forced rankings abandon multiple variables, and they magnify differences that aren't statistically significant.” The only time we ever say it’s not a race or that the forced ranking isn...

Recently, I was amused by the heading of an article titled “No ‘ ghar wapsi ’” for Nitish to the Mahagathbandhan. Given that ‘ghar wapsi’ is a phrase used to describe the conversion back to Hinduism, it felt kinda funny to use that phrase in the context of a possible return to the so-called “secular” side… On a completely apolitical note, the phrase also reminded me of Kathryn Schulz’s wonderful terrific book, Being Wrong . At one point, she talks about Whitaker Chambers, an ardent one-time Communist and committed atheist who flipped back to God and Christianity in the 1930’s. During a subsequent denunciation of one of his former colleagues, he said: “I became what I was. I ceased to be what I was not.” Rather than admitting that he had changed, Chambers felt “he had simply resumed his true identity”. Schulz says this claim is a “common feature of conversion narratives”: “Indeed, the very word “conversion” comes from a Latin verb that means not to change but to retur...

A trillion. 1 followed by 12 zeros. It feels like a special number, doesn’t it? But isn’t Ben Thompson right when he says : “It is nothing but a number, no different than 999,999,999,999 for all practical purposes, but we humans are not practical creatures: we attach importance to all kinds of silly things, round numbers chief amongst them.” When I think of my daughter’s passage through the world of numbers (so far), I realize how quickly we assign special place to “round numbers”. Once upon a time, my daughter used to count like this: “twenty eight, twenty nine, twenty ten ”. Now at seven, much older and somehow a teeny tiny bit wiser, I realized her understanding of numbers has improved… and changed. The first time was when we bought a new car and I asked her to remember the new registration plate number. Inevitably, a random 4-digit number. Here’s how she responded: “4 digits? No way I can remember that. A 1-digit number? Now that’s easy to remember. A 2-digit number?...

Believe it or not, bloodletting is one of the oldest medical practices! It’s been done with everything from leaches to “sharpened sticks, shark’s teeth, and miniature bows and arrows”, writes Sharon Moalem in her terrific book, Survival of the Sickest . In fact, many medical books were written on how (and how much) to draw blood! So what was the basis for this “treatment”? Siddhartha Mukherjee, in his masterpiece, The Emperor of All Maladies , tells about Hippocrates who came up with the theory of four bodily fluids termed “humors”: blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm. Any illness, he said, was due to the excess of one of those fluids. In AD 160, the physician Claudius Galen associated most of the known illnesses with specific “humors”. It followed that if certain illness were “caused” by the excess of blood, then the logical solution would be to… bleed the person! But wait, it gets even better (or worse). You can’t just bleed a person anywhere, writes Mukherjee: “If...

In his book, Filters Against Folly , Garrett Hardin cites a very interesting reason as to why communism doesn’t work. The one line summary: communism doesn’t scale up. Huh? What is scalability? Scalability refers to a system’s ability to work the same way as it gets bigger and bigger. Engineers and scientists know that most systems do not scale up: this is why a mouse cannot be the size of an elephant. Mathematically, it’s because: “The weight of an animal goes up as the cube of its linear dimensions, whereas the strength of its supporting limbs goes up only as the square.” Ok, but what’s the connection to communism? Let Shane Parrish summarize the scalability argument : “The reason communism or utopianism can work at small scale is because of the tight knit nature of a small group…(but) The problem is that the system of communist distribution which worked for a tight-knit group of 4 people did not scale to 400. Each person, less visible to the group and less caring abou...