Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Which technologies in history have had the most transformative impact? Venkatesh Rao, a tech blogger, lists these : “Electricity, steam power, precision clocks, written language, token currencies, iron metallurgy and agriculture.” That made me wonder why he said “written language” as opposed to just language. And then I remembered these points from different sources. James Gleick in his book, The Information , pointed out that “speech is too fleeting to allow for analysis”. He went on to point out that logical reasoning has “no power unless people can examine and evaluate them”. And he’s right: can you imagine confirming any theorem from geometry unless it was written down, allowing you to go over it at your own pace, to look back at a previous step in the chain of reasoning? Of course, the point extends beyond just the theorems of geometry: it applies to every logical chain of reasoning. From a different perspective, Paul Romer, in one of his blogs, wrote that : “Cle...

No matter what certain economists may tell you, you know that people aren’t rational in the choices they make. That is pretty obvious. And yet, we forget that every time we come up with a “rational” solution only to find that it ends up achieving a totally different and unexpected outcome, all because people aren’t rational! For example, there was this day care center in Israel that expected parents to pick up their kids by 4 pm. Sometimes, parents were late but not by much. Why? Because they had to interact with the teacher who had to stay late and thus felt apologetic and a bit guilty. An experiment was conducted to impose a fine for late pickups. The surprising consequence ? “In day cares where the fine was introduced, parents immediately started showing up late, with tardiness levels eventually leveling out at about twice the pre-fine level. That is, introducing a fine caused twice as many parents to show up late. What about the remaining four day care centers that remaine...

Due to a school function, my 7 yo daughter had very few classes all week. It was just “practice, practice, practice”. One evening, she told me that the teachers took the kids to the play area that day since the stage (or something, I wasn’t really paying attention) had to be decorated… by the teachers. “That meant the kids could run around the play area and have fun”, said my daughter. “And yet, a couple of them went to help the teachers”, she said, as if it was the most abnormal behavior in recorded history. “Nice kids”, I said just to irritate her. “No”, she snapped back, “The teachers don’t want them around. The kids just keep getting in the way, dropping things here, misplacing things there”. On a roll now, she continued, “Like the time when one kid said he couldn’t find whatever the teacher asked for. The teacher scolded him nicely, only to find that another kid was holding the thing in her hand with a proud it-was-with-me look”. Don’t ask me what the thing in quest...

When an act is committed, who should we hold responsible? Should we blame the person who commits the action? Or the ideology/belief that leads him to do it? Or the tools/environment that made the action possible? Can you honestly say you’ve never pointed at different sources, based on the situation or your moral/political orientation? Let’s check it out. Take the periodic gun killings that happen in America. Is the problem the killer, who post facto is almost always found to be a guy with a mental problem? Or is it the ease of procuring guns in “the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past five years”, as the Onion describes it? So why is it so easy to procure guns in the US? Because (brace yourself) it’s there in the constitution! Then again, as Scott Adams says : “The Founders wisely made it hard to change the Constitution, but they did give us the tools to do it. And we have changed it i...

Visual illusions. A subset of the more general category of all illusions. Visual illusions can be fun at times, like when we enjoy them at magic shows. At other times, they can be perplexing: how can squares A and B below be the same color? And yet they are : Then there is the famous ‘inferior mirage’, one that shows us things that don’t exist. Like the beaten to death oasis in a desert. If there’s such a thing as an ‘inferior mirage’, does that mean there’s a ‘superior mirage’, you ask? Yes. And it wrecked a man’s reputation. Kathryn Schulz describes it in her terrific book, Being Wrong . In 1818, John Ross set out to find a (faster) sea route from Europe to Asia via the Arctic. At one potential point of progress, he was disappointed when the fog cleared: a huge chain of mountains appeared about 27 miles. Ross gave up and returned. But his second-in-command, William Parry, who was following in a different ship, hadn’t seen any mountains blocking the way. Parry...

My 7 yo daughter would want one of us to be/work from home if she had a holiday or vacation. This was true as recently as her summer vacation a couple of months back. And then things changed, starting with her Dussehra holidays. Now she doesn’t want us home on her holidays. Apparently, like all parents through the ages, we get in the way of fun and freedom. Don’t watch TV all day. Enough of playing that game on the phone. No, it’s too cold to go to the pool. It’s too hot to go for a picnic with your friends in the afternoon…                  I learnt this the hard way when I worked from home one day during her Dussehra holidays… to keep her company. And she was out of the house all day with her friends. In the night, she asked me whether I’d be working from home the next day as well. No, I said. Thank god, she replied. Ouch! But why, I asked, I didn’t stop you from doing anything all day. She had tha...

“Never ask a question if you don’t know the answer.” -           Rowena Cherry in Knight's Fork That line describes the perfect sense for a lawyer to have. After all, he doesn’t want the witness to answer with something that harms his client! But what about areas other than the law? Asking truly open ended questions is harder than you think. In Philosophy in a New Key, Susanne Langer asks: “If we are asked: “Who made the world?” we may answer: “God made it,” “Chance made it,” “Love and hate made it,” or what you will. We may be right or we may be wrong. But if we reply: “Nobody made it,” … in this last instance, we have only seemingly given an answer; in reality we have rejected the question .” The point Langer is trying to make is that (unconsciously or not) the way a question is phrased can sometimes be very leading: “There can be only a certain number of alternatives that will complete its sense.” In her book, A Field ...

Every time India asks for the Kohinoor diamond, Britain says No. Was it really “given” to them voluntarily? Or at gun point? The answer to other requests to return such loot lying in European museums is the same No, whether the source is Africa or Aborigines or native Americans or Chinese antiquities. And yet, the same Europeans are all in favour of returning if it was what the Nazis looted. No, the reason’s not because everyone hates the Nazis. Sadly, the reason’s what Erin Thompson says : “The farther we get from Western Europe, the less morally compelling we seem to find the claims of those whose art Europeans looted.” And so she concludes: “Why are the victims of Nazi aggression more deserving than those of colonial violence? At root, I see no reason other than disdain for non-Europeans.” And while no real action is taken to right this historical wrong, the Guardian contents itself with moronic condemnation of (hold your breath) video games that involve “stealing” ...

In their book, Lessons of History , Will and Ariel Durant noted: “History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin flourished in every age.” Of course, that doesn’t change the view of people who insist that ancient times (and people) were better, morally speaking: they just say that the times they refer to were before recorded history. So how do they know about that pre-recorded era? No answer… it’s like religion, it’s faith based. In another part of their book, they say: “Probably every vice was once a virtue… man’s sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall.” They cite very interesting examples of such transformations. When man moved from hunting to agriculture, larger units were needed to sustain oneself e.g. on farms. And so marriage was early; children were farm hands and birth control became immoral. Then again, when we moved from agriculture to the industrial age, individuals could sustain themselves and: “The authority of fa...

The other day, one of my colleagues was telling me that her 5 year-old daughter had figured that Alexa, Amazon’s voice based assistant, could help with do her homework: “Alexa, what is 5 + 8?” I took this as exactly the kind of reason why I wouldn’t want Alexa in the home. When I was narrating this to my wife, my 7 yo daughter hung onto the conversation and joined in: She: “Can we get Alexa too? I won’t use it for my homework.” Me: “Then why do you want it?” She: “When my friends come home, I can ask it to play nice songs.” Wow! -           Who wants to use a clunky remote for the music system and then discover you don’t have that song you wanted to hear anyway? -           Searching via YouTube and Google on a computer/phone doesn’t come so easy for 5 and 7 yo’s, but with Alexa, they just ask for what they want! Kids take to Alexa like ducks to water. Like my colleague ...

Everybody wants to rule the world. Duh, this is the Game of Thrones , what else were you expecting?! But it’s key that those who rule know the duties that come with being a ruler. Mediocrity won’t suffice, and greatness? As Ser Barristan tells Daenerys: “Madness and greatness are two sides of the same coin. Every time a new Targaryen is born… the gods toss the coin in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it will land.” Duties are something that King Stannis had to be reminded: “He reminded me of my duty, when all I could think of was my rights.” Lose track of that, and your external enemies will prevail, laments Stannis: “I was trying to win the throne to save the kingdom, when I should have been trying to save the kingdom to win the throne.” Conquests and reigns are different beasts altogether, as Daenerys realizes. Missandei: “You have bought them freedom as well.” Daenerys: “Freedom to starve? Freedom to die?” Unlike some of the other contend...

Mass surveillance. Back in the 20th century, it was something we associated with the communist regimes of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. After their collapse, some of those countries threw open the books, writes Neal Ascherson: “For nearly thirty years, hundreds of thousands of people have been reading their secret police files, the records of surveillance, denunciation and manipulation compiled by the spooks of communist Europe.” And the portrait people see of themselves is scary: “These portraits may be the result of years of painstaking, insanely minute watching and eavesdropping by one or several security teams. Almost always, much of their detail comes from informers. Some informers won’t be identifiable. Some may be fictional, invented by idle security officers bumping up their expenses. But some will turn out to be the reader’s intimately trusted friends or lovers.” The amount of information gathered, the sheer “omnipresence of this invisible army of watchers a...