Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Debt waiver. In India, come election time, we always hear promises of farm loan waiver. And in the US? One of the Presidential candidates said she’d support student loan waivers. To which, Alan Jacobs asks : “Why only  student  loans? Millions of Americans who have never attended college are being crushed by debt. Why shouldn’t something be done for them?” An instinctive criterion many use to decide whose loans should be waived is their financial shape. Thus, they’d support waiving off farmer loans but not student loans. After all, aren’t graduates (statistically) in “significantly better financial shape” than those who didn’t take student loans? Aha, but as Fredrik de Boer writes , things are never that black and white: “If we lived in a vacuum and were doing nothing else, sure… but we don’t and we aren’t.” Instead, he says, we also have “income-rich but heavily indebted” folks who need to be helped via economic and social policies just as much as the worst o...

In his book, The Incredible History of India’s Geography , Sanjeev Sanyal writes that the Harappan civilization appears to have faded gradually , not in a big bang. The archaeological evidence doesn’t show any signs of slaughter consistent with a big invasion. He wonders if climate change was the culprit instead, making previously fertile areas arid? Or perhaps a major earthquake caused the course of river(s) that fed the civilization to change, in turn killing off the cities slowly? Regardless of the cause, the gradual non-violent fading away of Harappa stands in sharp contrast with how the Roman Empire collapsed: with violence. As Rome grew weaker, its enemies kept invading, often winning, always looting and destroying. For example, by the Goths. The contrast in how the two faded reminds me of the point that Peter Frankopan made in his terrific book, The Silk Roads . All through history, he writes, kingdoms fought wars with each other. But it was only in Europe that kingdo...

Tech blogger Om Malik writes that Amazon mentioned Alexa a record 25 times in their recent quarterly earnings release: “That’s a lot. But it’s not just that. It is how they talk about it. They are telling us again and again; this is their next big thing. It is going to be perhaps as big as the original Amazon itself.” -           Alexa, in case you live in a cave, responds to your queries, commands to play music, gets the news or whatever; -           Alexa also acts as the interface to other home devices from over 4,500 brands e.g. voice-controlled smart lights. Says Amazon, humans spoke to “Alexa tens of billions of more times in 2018 compared to 2017”; -           Developers write “skills” for Alexa that are like mini-features. The number of Alexa skills now stands at 80,000; -           Alex...

Nowadays, AI is used by companies to decide the price of goods and how/when to vary them. With no humans in the equation, this should avoid “price collusion”, right? (That’s legal speak for competing companies working together to keep prices higher than they would have been otherwise). Economists played off some of the AI algorithms against each other in a simulated environment. Guess what? The shape of the graph of prices over time matches what you’d see if price collusion is being practiced! Worse, the study found that this pattern occurs even with different AI’s in the mix: “Even when the active firms are three or four in number, when they are asymmetric, and when they operate in a stochastic environment.” And here’s the kicker. Guess what shows up in the logs the AI’s create of their activities, which could be used later by regulators to check for collusion? “What is most worrying is that the algorithms leave no trace of concerted action – they learn to collude pure...

Santosh Desai wrote that BJP chief, Amit Shah, horrified him when he declared that the BJP would “act against all infiltrators who were not Hindu, Sikh or Buddhist”. Why not just all infiltrators, why base it on religion, asks Desai. A valid question, no doubt. Desai worries most about the BJP supporters who don’t support any religion based actions and laws. Why? Because if you bring up topics like lynching or Shah’s comment with them, it’s like water off a duck: “If the subject is forced upon them, it is either made little of (you know how media today pounces on any and every little incident), dismissed as marginal (every party has lunatics, can’t take them seriously), presented as the norm (these things have always happened in the country, but now people with agendas amplify them), attributed to electoral compulsions (in order to win elections, they have to say all kinds of things, they don’t really mean it), sidestepped (after all every option comes with a downside- we d...

We are led to believe that commercial success doesn’t come to the best artists, that the best art is done for the “love of art”, not to cater to what others want. Seth Godin certainly agrees with that view: “You have to give the client work that you want your name on… Work that reflects your vision, your contribution and your hand. That makes it really difficult at first. Almost impossible. But if you ignore this rule because the pressure is on, it will never get easier.” Pablo Picasso disagrees with that view. Vehemently. As he once said: “ Few people understand anything about art, and not everyone is sensitive to painting. Most judge the world of art by success. Why, then, leave success to "best-selling painters"?” He goes on to add: “ An artist needs success. And not only to live off it, but especially to produce his body of work… For myself, I wanted to prove that you can have success in spite of everyone, without compromise.” Nassim Nicolas Taleb uses...

Electoral Bonds were launched in the 2017-18 budget as an attempt to cleanse the way political parties get funded. So why is it that they are under such scrutiny and criticism now? But first, let us go over the features of Electoral Bonds:          Any citizen, individual or corporate, can buy them via designated banks or via the Internet.         The bank issuing the bond runs KYC checks on the donor, and gets details of the account from which funds would be withdrawn to buy the bonds. Critically, you cannot buy these bonds using cash.         These are “bearer bonds”, i.e., they are not issued as payable to any one party. The donor can give the bond to any registered political party.         The bond has no information about the donor or the political party. That said, the issuing bank does have information of the donor (thanks to KYC).         Bonds come in deno...

On slavery, historian Katie Kelaidis points out: “Millennia of great moral teachers sought to come to terms with slavery and to mitigate its inhumanity, but no one—not Jesus, not Buddha, not Muhammad, not Socrates—considered the complete liberation of all slaves.” I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it reminded me that bringing about any change on aspects deeply ingrained into society’s fabric requires political will. Moral preaching alone will never suffice. When Daenerys tries to abolish slavery and faces the inevitable backlash in Game of Thrones , Ser Barriston Selmy’s statement strikes her with full force: “No ruler can make a people good.” And yet, to bring about change, a ruler needs support on the ground, as Daenerys reminds herself: “To rule Meereen I must win the Meereenese however much I may despise them.” The continuous hit-and-run attacks by those who were the beneficiaries of slavery means the price is being paid by Daenerys and innocents alike. ...

At work, I’ve heard 2 diametrically opposite philosophies on whether to advise others without being asked : 1)       Yes, I would : If I know something from experience, it’s the right thing to guide and advise others. We’re all one team, right? Why let someone stumble and run into trouble when I can help them avoid it? 2)      No, I wouldn’t : When people get advice for free (unasked), they don’t value it and just ignore it. Instead, I’ll wait for them to ask, because then they’ll evaluate what I have to say sincerely. There’s no right answer to this question obviously. And to complicate the decision even more for these reasons that Seth Godin describes : 1)       Every situation is different : As Godin puts it, “you'll waste everyone's time if you base your advice on your assumptions, instead of what's actually happening”. 2)      Beliefs and end goals can be different : “It's entir...

When Rahul Gandhi announced his Nyay scheme (Rs 72,000 p.a. to around 50 million families), people at office reacted predictably:           It’s just an election gimmick;            How is he planning to get the money for this? Would he reduce the current spending on (the Army?) for his scheme? How can he formulate such a massive scheme without giving thought to the specifics?            Or does he plan to increase taxes? Why should the middle class have to bear the burden when the Congress only looks out for its vote-bank, the poor and rural folks?            And given his party’s track record of opposing Aadhar, how does he intend to ensure the money is given to the right people? Or is this just the usual Congress kind of scheme, where middlemen and the Congress siphon off most of the money?            The more financially aware al...

Far too frequently than I care to admit, I hit myself on the head wondering, “How come I never even thought of the question (let alone finding the answer)?”. Turns out Francis Bacon knew the importance of asking the right question: “A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.” Take the number ‘e’. Those with the maths background to know of it would probably have been introduced to ‘e’ via this equation: In case you wondered what the term with the exclamation means: it is math-speak for “multiply all the numbers from 1 till that number” (Thus, 2! = 1 x 2; 4! = 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 and so on). Given we instinctively think of the number ‘e’ via the above definition, no wonder it seems like a number defined as an arbitrary sequence of calculations. And yet, this arbitrarily defined number pops up across science equations across topics as diverse as the charging of a capacitor or the rate of radioactive decay. The question I read on the Net was: Is the occurrence of ‘e’ in such divers...

Santosh Desai describes the choice for on-the-fence, open-to-changing-their-stance voters as follows: “Depending on how one sees it, the choices could be framed in several ways. Anarchy or Autocracy? Corruption or Hate? Instability or Institutional collapse? If the choices were described in such starkly negative terms, what is it that one is truly offended by?” Here’s how I’d answer his last question. When people are presented with such negative choices, they look for something positive in the side they pick. And on that front, the Opposition fails miserably since they have nothing in common other than wanting Modi to lose (that’s a negative “not Modi” agenda). Modi, on the other hand, (rightly or wrongly) is associated with decisiveness, as the “person most likely to bring about transformational change in the economy” and “the feeling that even if his first term might not have delivered fully, he is still the best option among the choices available ”. Modi is (still) associa...