Viswanathan K's Thoughts

A complex idea or concept tends to get simplified when explained to someone new or young. Sometimes, it gets too simplified to the point of conveying the wrong picture. Like the idea of maya in Amar Chitra Katha’s. In those comics, maya always came across as meaning something similar to a mirage, something that appears to exist but isn’t there. Of course, that’s not at all what maya means. The far more nuanced aspect of maya is that what you perceive to be reality isn’t an accurate picture.   Some time back, I heard this fascinating podcast with Donald Hoffman on this perceived-reality-is-incomplete theme (not maya itself). Some of those aspects are well known: we can’t see bacteria, but they do exist. Light spans a much wider spectrum than what we can see. We can’t hear sounds that dogs can. I could go on, but you get the idea: our senses are limited.   Hoffman goes on to add the neurological aspects to the topic. How do you think we see? Most of us would say, “...

Everywhere we look, people complain about different aspects of the Internet: information overload, filter bubbles, fake news etc. But, none of these are new complaints, say Tom Standage and Seth Stevenson in their Secret History of Future podcast . The same complaints were heard even when (drumbeats) printing was invented!   Huh? What were the concerns with printing, other than the infamous problem the Church had, over losing its power? Well, there was the concern that printing would soon lead to garbage drowning out the good stuff. Even among the good topics, how would one know which particular book to read? And how could one ever know if anything written was really true at all? Oh, and there was also the concern among some that the proliferation of books would soon mean that nobody could ever know everything, because there would be too much information out there.   As you can see, some of these concerns were legitimate. And so, solutions that we now take for grant...

Before 2010, Aung San Suu Kyi was the darling of the West, “a beacon of hope, an icon of democracy peacefully fighting the Tatmadaw (Myanmar’s armed forces) and its junta”, writes Michal Lubina. But then came the violent expulsion of the Rohingyas, where Suu Kyi sided with the army, and she became the “Nobel Peace Prize winner who had betrayed her fundamental values”. Was Suu Kyi then the personification of this line from the Batman movie: “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”   Or did the West mis-assess her? Ben Rhodes had written that she was “the idealist, the activist, the politician, the cold pragmatist”. Lubina agrees and points out how complex things have always been. The army was too well-entrenched when she started her political struggle. She understood she could never win with violence, so she switched to “non-violence as a calculated, political choice”: “She made a virtue out of necessity.”   After ...

How was the Hieroglyphics script cracked? The found-by-luck Rosetta Stone showed side by side translations in Hieroglyphics, Demotic and ancient Greek. That one piece was the help that cracked the Hieroglyphics code.   And what did Google Translate use as its Rosetta Stone (of different languages) when it was launched in 2006? Documents from the United Nation and European Parliament. On the Internet, finding huge data sets which can be fed to a software algorithm isn’t hard, and it is the reason why Google can search for pictures, and Facebook can recognize your friends. All those machine learning algorithms are only as good as the data set that they “learnt” from.   Which brings us to TikTok, the app that shows you 10-second videos. But how was TikTok’s machine learning (ML) algorithm   going to “learn” when there were almost no 10-second videos to feed to the algorithm to train it? That’s the question Eugene Wei asks and answers in this great piece : “In a uni...

Everybody tends to curse politicians. Many of the reasons are valid, of course. But politics is the art of operating within the bounds of what’s possible. Or as Barack Obama said : “I used to explain to my staff after we had a long policy debate about anything, and we had to make a decision about X or Y, “Well, if we do this I understand we’re not getting everything we’re hoping for, but is this better?” And they say yes, and I say, “Well, better is good. Nothing wrong with better.” That’s a point most of us understand and agree with in our calmer moments.   Unfortunately, we’re rarely calm when we think of politicians or policies. Instead, we’re almost always in an antagonistic mindset. So for the same outcome, we think differently based on who’s in power. His political opponents won’t let my guy do the good he wants to. The other guy never intended to do any good anyway. My guy did the best anyone could have done. Your guy sold out.   The passage below by Ib...

Is stupidity expanding? That’s the question David Gross asks: “It feels to me that in recent years, people have gotten stupider, or that stupid has gotten bigger, or that the parts of people that were always stupid have gotten louder, or something like that.” This blog is only about the “No, stupidity is not expanding” reasons .   Frequency illusion : Aka Baader–Meinhof phenomenon : “The frequency illusion is that once something has been noticed then every instance of that thing is noticed, leading to the belief it has a high frequency of occurrence.”   Diversification : Everyone can express their views easily: “What used to look like non-stupidity was actually widespread conformity to a common menu of foolishnesses… (Today) there is increasing diversity in foolishness. Divergent fools seem more foolish to each other when in fact we’re all just as stupid as we’ve always been.”   Dispersal rates : In the pre-Internet era, private views remained limited ...

Are we approaching an inversion point for the Internet, wonders Ben Evans. Here’s what he means. Look back at how the (layman) Internet got started: “When Netscape launched in 1994 and kicked off the consumer internet, there were maybe 100m (million) PCs on earth, and over half of them were in the USA.” Inevitably then, with such a skewed distribution of users: “American companies set the agenda and created most of the important products and services, and American attitudes, cultures and laws around regulation and speech dominated.”   And today? “80-90% of internet users are now outside the USA.” The invention of the smartphone changed the uses of the Internet dramatically: “The internet became vastly more important. In the last decade it has gone from being interesting and exciting but not really an important part of most people’s lives to being a central part of society.”   All of which brings us to Evans’ point about an inversion point, a point in time ...

History is usually written and described in narrative form. I heard this very interesting podcast on the pros and cons of that approach, as well as the alternatives to narrative history. But, first here’s how narrative history works: 1)     Pick a historical character, based on importance. Then make him/her the central character of the story. This is the story of kings and queens, generals and strategists, presidents and prime ministers. 2)     Base it on heroic or tragic events, or vice and virtue. This too inevitably becomes individual based story telling.   While the story feels coherent, this approach has its well-known problems. “Speedbumps” in the narrative becomes problematic e.g. a good king who does evil things. And since everyone is grey, this applies to every single instance of narrative history. Include the speedbumps and the story loses its coherence; exclude them and it appears incomplete, or worse, biased. Another issue is that narra...

So Trump lost. Santosh Desai is brutally honest about who won : “Joe Biden is no one’s dream politician. But he represents a return to something familiar and comfortable, and for now, that seems to be more than enough.” In other words, anyone but Trump. Hardly a positive sentiment.   Tom Nichols was quick to demonize those who voted for Trump: “Sadly, the voters who said in 2016 that they chose Trump because they thought he was “just like them” turned out to be right. Now, by picking him again, those voters are showing that they  are  just like him: angry, spoiled, racially resentful, aggrieved, and willing to die rather than ever admit that they were wrong.” It shows how polarized the US is today.   Not being an American allows Desai to be more objective than Nichols: “(Trump) is a compendium of scandals. He is accused by not one but 26 women of sexual misconduct, he has lied and cheated in business, his family wallows in a very public form of nep...

In their book, Weird Maths , David Darling and Agnito Banerjee have a chapter on whether certain sports can be “solved”, i.e., can a winning (or at minimum, avoid a loss) strategy be found for every game that can be played in that sport?   Chess has far too many variations that increase exponentially as the game progresses, and thus not solvable for every possible game. However: “The top computers are now so far beyond the rating ever achieved by a human that it’s safe to say that no one will ever defeat the best computer chess players again.”   More interestingly: “Games don’t need a big board in order to be complex.” Remember that game, dots and boxes? You create a rectangular grid of points. Players alternately draw a line between any two points (horizontally or vertically, not diagonally). The person who joins the fourth side of a square to complete it “gets” that square. At the end, whoever has more squares wins. Now for the interesting point: once the grid ...

It’s hard to imagine that just a few decades back, the term “digital divide” had such a low bar, writes Danny Crichton: “Facility with using computers was determined by the ability to turn it on and log in, a bar so low that it can be shocking to the modern reader to think that a “divide” existed at all.” Sounds almost laughable today, right?   Is today’s definition of the digital divide as one between those who know how to write software (“code”) v/s those who don’t? After all, as almost all information is digitized, the need for almost everyone to be able to slice and dice it, to interpret, has increased. Knowing how to use the formulas in MS Excel is one such skill. But we also see the rise of what are called “no-code platforms”: “These tools are designed to make it much easier for users to harness the power of computing in their daily work.” Such platforms do most of the heavy lifting, you just need to point it to your data files, and tweak the settings so the plat...

The Pulwama attack is back in the news again, thanks to a (current) opposition party leader and ex-Speaker in Pakistan, Sardar Ayaz Sadiq. He claimed in Pakistan’s Parliament that the reason for releasing captured Indian Air Force Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman was fear of a bigger Indian attack.   This blog, though, isn’t about the reasons why the pilot was released. Rather, it’s about something this news reminded me of, from that book of assorted assessments on China I had read some time back ( China Ascendant ). It’s a question many ask: despite being Pakistan’s so called “all-weather friend”, why didn’t China say, threaten or do anything during that episode (and other such similar incidents)?   Part of the answer is that China’s investments and support for Pakistan isn’t “altruistic” (obviously). It is about China’s strategic, bigger picture interests: (1) Part of its Silk Road/OBOR connectivity project needs to run through Pakistan, culminating in the Gwadar ...

It’s been a long time since I wrote about COVID-19, so here I go again. When India’s active case count (number of people still with the virus) started dipping, I crossed my fingers and hoped we had turned the tide. It’s been a few weeks since then and touchwood, and this is how the graph looks now (it’s falling): India is formulating its plans on how to rollout the vaccine (if and when that is available), hedges its bets by pursuing indigenous vaccines as well as trying out the Russian vaccine, identifies whom to prioritize first (doctors and other healthcare folks, truck drivers etc), and explores the option of using this as an opportunity to issue Digital Health ID’s for all. And even now, we hardly hear any politicking on the topic of the virus across states, across political parties.   On the other hand, there’s the US, which still shows no signs of reversing the trend of active cases (still rising, never fell): But that doesn’t stop Trump from claiming not just success,...