Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Until this year, my 8 yo daughter used to have monthly tests (and no exams). You’d think she’d have been happy with that state of affairs, but no. “Kids with exams get study holidays”, she’d whine, “I don’t”. This year she got her wish: exams and study holidays. Little did she realize it also meant a lot of studying. A lot. Be careful what you wish for, kiddo, it might come true. And boy, has it been brutal. For her and me both. The school had helpfully put out sample exam papers, and like any true blood Indian parent, I too had forced her to take it. Then there was the increased content to learn, far more than what she was used to in her monthly cycles. And last, but not least, she learnt to her dismay that study holidays are for, er, studying. As you can imagine, my daughter was soon sick of “so much studying”. On weekdays, on weekends, on study holidays . And since I was the one tormenting her, we had many exchanges during that period: -      ...

Recently, the Supreme Court expressed its concern wrt social media and called for guidelines to curb its misuse. While it’s easy to understand the concern, unfortunately there’s probably no solution to the problem. It’s not just about India. Democracies world over make the same noises about social media, but pretty much every time one of them has framed laws on the topic, they’ve solved very little and end up creating a host of new problems. The cure turns out to be the worse than the disease. But why should that be the case? Just because nobody’s framed the right laws doesn’t mean it can’t be done, right? Hmmm… check out Ben Thompson’s podcast on the topic. He starts with the backdrop to social media. Historically, most markets check bad behavior via price. But with the Internet, it’s all free, the tool called “price” became inapplicable as a check. Unlike older mediums, the Internet allows anyone to find like-minded people somewhere or the other. So even if the pe...

In their book, The Elephant in the Brain , the authors describe this weird aspect of deception that we practice: deceiving ourselves! That is so weird: “If our minds contain maps of our worlds, what good comes from having an inaccurate version of these maps?” The Sigmund Freud school of thought treats self-deception as a defense mechanism, “a way for the ego to protect itself”. The mind seeks to protect itself from anxiety and other negative emotions. Many object to this reasoning: since accurate information is so critical to our survival, surely distorting information would be dangerous. Wouldn’t the goal of protecting our self-esteem have been better achieved by making the brain’s self-esteem mechanism stronger instead? The new school of thought explains self-deception as “primarily outward-facing, manipulative, and ultimately self-serving”. This is based on Thomas Schelling’s work on game theory: “In a variety of scenarios, limiting or sabotaging yourself is the winn...

I wrote earlier about the difficulty of trying to teach one’s kid the value of money. And it just keeps getting worse: these days, even kids in the 7-9 age bracket compare how much money their parents have! After one such discussion, my 8 yo came to me, and without any hope whatsoever, asked, “Do we have at least 1 crore rupees?”. Apparently, that’s the minimum amount to be part of the kids’ club downstairs. If she’s ejected from her group, then she’ll be at home in the evenings. And if she’s at home, she’ll chew our brains out. So, I reasoned, the smart course of action was to say, “Yes, we have a crore”. Pariah status averted. A few months later, she noticed a car with a moon roof and asked if we could buy one too. “No, we don’t have the money”, I replied. “Why”, she countered, “I thought you said we have a crore”. That she can remember, but try to get her to study… More recently, she came home one evening all riled up. Turns out they were all setting up stalls down...

In his book titled Hackers , Stephen Levy describes how computer programs were written as recently as 1959: -        Not anyone could submit a program; you needed “official clearance” first. After all, the large-as-a-room computers cost a bomb; -        An operator would punch holes in long cards corresponding to the program: each hole represented an instruction to the computer; -        A “stack of these cards made a computer program”; -        Wait, there’s more! Those cards would be taken to another operator, who would feed the cards to a “reader” that would note where the holes were and dispatch them to the computer; -        As if all this wasn’t bad enough, it could hours, even days, before one got to see the output. And often it would just prove there was an error in the program! At MIT, the operators of the compute...

A new company used to face several major challenges, far beyond the quality and/or price of its product: 1)       Distribution : Finding a way to make its product available far and wide. 2)      Marketing : Making consumers aware of their product. 3)      Visibility : In a shop, prime positioning had to be paid for to ensure your product was placed where it would be found/noticed easily. All of these points made it hard for new players to enter the market. They are also collectively called “friction”. Conversely, as Ben Thompson wrote : “Initial success was hard, but once achieved, a sustainable business almost certainly resulted.” But now with the Internet, “friction is gone”. Just think of the kinds of things you can find effortlessly thanks to Amazon. And then there’s bureaucratic friction, what Cass Sunstein called “sludge” in his recent paper : “Consumers, employees, students, and others are often...

Elias Riedel Gårding wrote this short and sweet article describing the particles that make up the Standard Model of physics. At school, most of us thought that list consisted of electrons, protons and neutrons: “But atoms are not the end of the story… Protons and neutrons are themselves composed of tiny constituents called  up-quarks  and  down-quarks  (a proton consists of two up-quarks and one down-quark, a neutron of one up-quark and two down-quarks).” Ok, is there anything in the universe not made of electrons and quarks? There’s one answer that is familiar to most people: light. And it is made of photons. With photons, are we done with the list of all particles then? Nope: “We have discovered a whole slew of them (other particles) in cosmic rays and in particle colliders.” Here is where things stand today: “After much head-scratching, it has turned out that they are all different combinations composed from a small set of particles that are – as f...

Once upon a time, a good photograph was a combo of the skill of the photographer + the lens quality. And while those factors still matter, there’s now a 3 rd parameter in that equation, writes Ben Evans: “Most of the advances in smartphone cameras now happen in software.” The software helps “get a better picture out of the raw data coming from the hardware”. A while back, Apple launched “a dual-lens system but uses software to assemble that data into a single refocused image”. And today, both Google and Apple offer the capability with a single-lens system! Don’t ask me how, but machine learning algorithms are able to do it… Welcome to the age where: “The technical quality of the picture you see gets better because of new software as much as because of new hardware.” For example, today’s portrait mode in smartphones does “face detection as well as depth mapping to work out what to focus on”. Exposure, color-balance, you name it: the software can deal with it: “W...

All games need to have rules. That’s obvious. What’s less obvious is the importance of striking the right balance between how many constraints the rules impose v/s how much room they leave for never-played-before scenarios. Why is that important? In a checkers world championship, a huge number of games turned out to be identical to games played earlier in checkers history. Yes, that’s right: every single move by both players was identical to an earlier game! If that’s not the definition of a boring sport, then what is? It clearly means that the rules of checkers are too constrictive and leave almost no room for variation. Many accuse chess of being the same. Thanks to all the books and computers, chess openings and endings have been analyzed to death, which means both those parts of chess are played by rote memory. Except that world chess champion, Magnus Carlsen, seems to have found a way to break that boring trend, writes Tyler Cowen: “Other grandmasters prepare th...

When we think of Boolean algebra (the maths of dealing with TRUE and FALSE, the operations of AND, OR, NOT), we think of it as only being relevant to the way digital computers work. And yet the first application of Boolean algebra wasn’t to do with computers at all! Here is that story from Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman’s biography of Claude Shannon (the founder of Information Theory) titled A Mind at Play . When Shannon was a student at MIT, he was studying electrical circuits: 1)       A switch could be used to turn on or off the current; 2)      Arranging the circuit elements in different ways allowed for current to flow only when, say, two switches were On, but not if zero, one or three switches were On. But designing such circuits was an art in those days, not a science, “with all the mess and false-starting and indefinable intuition that “art” implies”. Shannon also learnt Boolean algebra, the algebra from over a century ea...

As I was re-reading Jennifer Senior’s terrific book on parenting, All Joy and No Fun , I found the part on “the rise of the useless child” amusing and educative: “As far as children are concerned, (for today’s middle-class parents), there is no such thing as excess. If improving their children’s lives means running themselves ragged – and thinking themselves ragged – then so be it.” But it wasn’t always like this, writes Senior, as she takes a trip through history: “In the early nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution created a massive demand for child labour… Child labour on farms became especially valuable.” It was only much, much later that the transformation happened: “Childhood as we think of it today – long and sheltered, devoted almost entirely to education and emotional growth – became standard… Academics and sports. Modern childhood had begun.” And so she summarizes tongue-in-cheek: “Children had become “economically worthless but emotionally priceles...

Daniel Pink’s book, When , is a wake-up call on why our intuitive feel on one aspect of problem solving may be very wrong: “We simply don’t take issues of when as seriously as we take questions of what .” We ignore the “when” even though we all know this: “( Late chronotypes ) wake long after sunrise, detest mornings, and don’t begin peaking until late afternoon or early evening… (Early chronotypes) rise early and feel energized during the day but wear out by evening.” Consider the impact to young people who “begin undergoing the most profound change in chrono-biology of their lifetimes around puberty”. And yet, most schools world over start early in the day: “(Schools) force these extreme owls into schedules designed for chirpy seven-year-old larks.” So why not change schools to start a bit later? Aha, guess how the adults who set the school time think: “What difference can one hour possibly make”, ask the forty- and fifty-year olds.” And then there’s the fact...

We feel obliged/pressurized to be perfect. As Shane Parrish wrote : “Don’t waste time, we’re told. Maximize the output of your moments. Minimize your energy expenditure.” So the opposite of efficient must be bad, right? Wrong. After all: “Inefficient does not mean ineffective, and it is certainly not the same as lazy.” In fact, going way further, Parrish says: “There is real value in not being the best at everything.” Did that sound blasphemous? Let him elaborate. One, there’s the impact that being perfect at something changes has on us, consciously or unconsciously: “ Total efficiency constrains us. We become super invested in maintaining the status quo because that is where we excel. Innovation is a threat. Change is terrifying. Being perfect at something is dangerous if it’s the only thing you can do.” But of course, change will happen: “ Efficiency is great in an unchanging environment, but to expect an environment to remain static is unrealistic. Environm...