Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Data is the new oil, they say. That seems obvious when you think of Google, Facebook, Baidu and Tencent, writes Yuval Noah Harari in 21 Lessons for the 21 st Century . And yet, we give our data away so easily: “People are happy to give away their most valuable asset – their personal data – in exchange for free email services and funny cat videos. It is a bit like African and Native Americans tribes who unwittingly sold entire countries to European colonialists in exchange for colorful beads and cheap trinkets.” We are heading for a future described below: “What will happen when we can ask Google, “Hi Google, based on everything you know about cars, and based on everything you know about me (including my needs, my habits, my views on global warming, and even my opinions about Middle Eastern politics) – what is the best car for me?” Or maybe we’ll be asking Facebook or Alexa/Amazon that question, but the point is the same. If we, as individuals and as a society, don’t f...

The common man today thinks that the democratic form of government he has comes from the Greeks. Wrong! Sure, the Greeks, as usual, were good with ideas in philosophy and yes, about democracy. But, as with all matters practical, the Greeks never solved the messiness of democracy problem. The ones who did solve that problem best were the Romans. I’ll just repeat the description of Rome’s solution from an earlier blog : “Their solution? To form a republic. It was a trial and error system of government that evolved with time and events: -          They create a body of aristocrats called the Senate. The Senate, however, could not pass laws and had no legal powers. Instead, all adult male citizens voted in the assemblies for the passing of bills. But, of course, the money of the aristocrats still wielded influence. -          From amongst the senators, two were elected as “consuls”, not by the ...

Some time back, Google asked the US government to follow India’s UPI scheme, a part of the India Stack , to enable digital financial innovation. Ernst and Young reports indicate that India and China lead the rate of fintech adoption (87%) while the highest ranked developed country was Holland (73%). So why is the rate of fintech adoption lower in the West? A big part of the answer is that India has the UPI system that is part of the India Stack. Whereas the US (and the West) don’t have any equivalent system. Let me explain the difference that makes. In India, when you install, say Google Pay , your phone number is already seeded with your Aadhar number. So too are your bank accounts. Ergo, the app can query for all banks seeded with the same Aadhar number as the phone on which the app is installed. Without the app ever knowing your Aadhar number: the stack is designed that way! You select the bank account from the list the query threw up, and bingo! The app can now access a...

I saw this news about the Karnataka act against inhuman practices and black magic finally becoming law: “The act bans performing any black magic, inhumane act and evil practices in search of treasure or bounty, tantric acts which include physical and sexual assault, practices such as parading people naked, ostracising a person in the name of a ritual and encouraging inhumane acts during said rituals, exorcism, assaulting people under the pretext of exorcism, misinformation and creating a panic-like situation under the pretext of ghosts and black magic and others.” It brought back memories of this podcast on the strange impact of that famous horror movie, The Exorcist . In case you don’t know, that’s a movie from the 1970’s about a girl who got possessed, on whom a priest performed exorcism to finally rid her of the demon. As a consultant priest for the movie, Tom Bermingham said: “Making the movie was strange enough. But the aftermath was completely bizarre.” Bizarre how...

Paul Graham writes of a common lament among adults long after they graduate: “In theory, tests are merely what their name implies: tests of what you've learned in the class. In theory you shouldn't have to prepare for a test in a class any more than you have to prepare for a blood test.” And: “In practice… things are so different that hearing this explanation of how classes and tests are meant to work is like hearing the etymology of a word whose meaning has changed completely.” No surprise then that this is how we go through school and college: “For me, as for most students, the measurement of what I was learning completely dominated actual learning in college.” But isn’t this just a cost of doing business, a way to get a job? No, says Graham: “The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades.” Huh? How can learning to get good grades be a damaging thing?! Lamentable a...

Machiavelli (“M”) wrote another book, The Discourses . In it, he describes three forms of government: monarchy, aristocracy (as in “meritocracy”) and democracy. He wrote all three can degenerate into bad forms of governance. Monarchy can easily become a tyranny. Aristocracies turn into cliquish oligarchies. And democracies can descend into chaotic mob rule. So M’s preferred solution? A Republic. Not the way we see it now. Rather, he wanted it in the way ancient Rome was : a mix of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. M was asking for a system with checks and balances in place! Wait, it gets better: M felt the job of a government is to provide stability, security and provide a setup where people can just get on with their lives. See how close this sounds to many modern governments? See how contradictory this book is to the more (in)famous The Prince ? Sebastian Major’s second podcast explores The Prince again with all of the above in mind. And then you see The Prince is ab...

Niccolo Machiavelli. (I’ll call him “M” in the rest of the blogs). A man synonymous with ruthlessness and power hungriness. Unethical, unscrupulous, cut-throat. The book behind that reputation, The Prince , was called “a handbook for gangsters” by Bertrand Russell. At the peak of the war between Catholics and Protestants, the two sides could agree on one thing: M was a bad guy. Of course, the Catholics thought M was a heretic, like the Protestants. While the Protestants thought that M’s advice was exactly how the Catholics behaved. The museum in Florence has statues of Galileo, Leonardo, Michelangelo... and M! To many (not just in Florence), M was an intellectual hero. He was a great philosophical and political thinker. So which view is right? In the first part of his podcast on the man, Sebastian Major contends that you can’t decouple M from the environment he lived in. Ergo, he takes us back to Florence in the 1400’s, one of the great city-state powers of the age along w...

In Prisoners of Geography , Tim Marshall, says that post World War II, the “acceptance of the presence on European lands of a single overwhelming power, the USA” led to the birth of NATO and paved the way for the creation of the EU: “What is now the EU was setup so that France and Germany could hug each other so tightly that neither could get an arm free with which to punch the other.” The EU went on to expand to include more and more countries to become what it is today. It even created a common currency, the Euro: “They were all supposed to have levels of debt, unemployment and inflation within certain limits.” But the difference in wealth across nations meant an economic union was going to be a problem. Some like the Greeks were just “cooking the books”: “But because the euro is not just a currency – it is also an ideology – the members turned a blind eye.” Until the 2008 financial crisis, that is. Germans were up in arms when they found themselves having to bail ou...

As the dust begins to settle on the assassination of Iranian military commander, Qaseem Soleimani, the Americans seem to have won by a knock out. The US took out a very powerful Iranian. The Iranian ballistic missiles, on the other hand, didn’t kill even a single American. In the fog of war, the Iranians now admit to accidentally shooting down that civilian airliner in Teheran. On the other hand, Iran could still be playing the long game. They could aggravate the mess that is Iraq via action and inaction. They could ease off the anti-ISIS effort, and play the very dangerous game of allowing ISIS to rise enough to continue attacking the West but without allowing ISIS to become a threat to either Iran itself or its ally, Syria. Iran might also choose to launch very damaging cyber-attacks against Saudi Arabia, like they’ve done so successfully in the past. Tyler Cowen looks at a different aspect to all this, namely the role of fake news : “There is a lot of talk about the e...

Tyler Cowen, an American professor, make some interesting points about the criticism of Modi. Like many, he doesn’t favour “replacing India’s secular democracy with “Hindu nation” as a ruling principle”. First, he points out Indian democracy was never liberal: “National voting has so much to do with religion, caste, and other particularistic principles that Indian democracy never enforced superior practical performance as it should have.” Then a slew of factors lined up: Modi himself, India’s economic growth, higher expectations from the state, global terrorism and Islam being at the center of it. He says Modi’s critics focus on either his failures or the policies they dislike but ignore the positive actions he has also brought about: “The positive and negative sides of the story here may be more closely related than is comfortable to contemplate.” Cowen then draws a parallel to the Renaissance! “The picture reminds me a bit of how parts of Renaissance Europe wer...

In his excellent book on meditation and enlightenment using Buddhism as the medium, Why Buddhism is True , Robert Wright says our experience of a thing (in the un-enlightened state) is never of that thing’s essence. Rather: “The stories we tell about things, and thus the beliefs we have about their history and their nature, shape our experience of them.” The beaten to death example of this is, yes, wine tasting. Tell someone the bottle of wine is a premium one (“That was a very good year”) v/s just a “table wine”, and most people will say they felt the former tasted far better. Even when both bottles contained the same wine. This suggests there is a superficiality to our pleasures. Conversely: “A deeper pleasure would come if we could somehow taste the wine itself, unencumbered by beliefs about it that may or may not be true.” That, as Wright puts it, is “closer to the Buddhist view of the matter”, since the point being made applies to pretty much everything, not just...

Going back to the beginning, remember how HeLa cells were obtained without patient consent, a standard practice of that time? Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks explores the ethics of using cells/tissues for research. Take the case of Ted Slavin. A hemophiliac born in the 1950’s, he had undergone multiple blood confusions. And as was the case then, much of those transfusions hadn’t been checked for diseases. Thus, he’d been exposed to the Hepatitis B virus again and again. And in response, his body was “producing something extremely valuable”: antibodies to Hepatitis B . Slavin contacted labs and pharma companies to ask if “they wanted to buy his antibodies”: “They said yes in droves… Slavin was only the first of many who have since turned their bodies into businesses.” Henrietta Lacks, the woman from whom the HeLa cells came, on the other hand, didn’t even know her cells were taken for research. We can’t right historical wrongs, but what should be th...

In 1951, the world was facing a polio epidemic. Jonas Salk thought he’d invented a polio vaccine. If Salk was right, this was a godsend. But could one risk injecting it into kids world over? And how to test it on a massive scale for side-effects? And so the US turned to HeLa, writes Rebecca Skloot in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks . They created a “HeLa factory”, to produce cells on an “enormous, industrial scale”. The fact that HeLa cells could be shipped by mail, without too much paraphernalia to protect or preserve them, was a huge bonus. And thus HeLa cells “helped prove the Salk vaccine effective”. The avalanche of uses of HeLa had just got started: As scientists began to understand viruses, “researchers began exposing (HeLa cells) to viruses of all kinds” to test for their effects. Another set used HeLa to find ways to freeze cells without damaging or changing them. This ability to freeze, aka “pause”, in turn created other uses. Scientists could pause cell...

The 1950’s was a time when ideas like patient consent didn’t exist, writes Rebecca Skloot in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks . In fact: “Many scientists believed that since patients were treated for free in public wards, it was fair to use them as research subjects as a form of payment.” Johns Hopkins’ views on the topic were no different. So they used to pass on cells from their all too many black, indigent patients to researchers. Henrietta Lacks was one of their patients: black, indigent and with cervical cancer. This was also an era when scientists had no way to grow/keep alive human cells in culture. Lacks’ cells came to a researcher named George Gey. Voila! “(Her cells) were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory. ” Unlike other cells, which either didn’t grow at all, or only for a few generations. Gey realized a possible use imme...