Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In the West, we see periodic clamouring that Google or Facebook or Amazon has too much data, and that they be split up e.g. Google into search, YouTube, Gmail and Android each as a separate company. Or Facebook into, er, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp as separate companies.   While India sees the problem, the DEPA framework acknowledges some of the benefits of one company having a lot of data. A massive Amazon or Flipkart that delivers all over the country can bring down costs for consumers, something not possible if every company in that sector was small.   What then would be a good balance? Rahul Matthan asks us to consider a bank in in The Third Way . As the entity with all the personal financial data, it has an outsized advantage. No new entity with a new idea in the lending space can ever hope to compete against a bank with so much information. DEPA’s architecture has a way, at least in theory. The data the banks holds is actually the account owner’s data. There...

Most animals spend all their time “eating, resting and mating”. They have very little free time. Until primates broke that trend. Since they lived on trees and plucked fruits from the tree (high calories), they got a luxury few species have – free time! Combine that with the fact that primates lived in groups, says Max Bennett half tongue-in-cheek in A Brief History of Intelligence : “Primates seemed to have filled their open calendars with politicking.”   Scientists believe that politicking that led to the Theory of Mind , the ability to model the mind of another individual. What is the other individual trying to do? Why? In politicking, being able to understand the mind of other players is an obvious advantage.   There are a class of neurons called mirror neurons . They get activated when a primate watched others perform certain actions. See the other one peel a banana, and the observer would salivate! What evolutionary use could these mirror neurons have served?...

During the discussions and debates on the key directions of the Constitution, the leftists wanted the words “socialist” and “secular” in the Preamble. Others bemoaned the absence of Gandhian principles. And another set asked why a reference to a godhead was absent. Ambedkar opposed all of these. (“Socialist” and “secular” would be inserted decades later in 1976 via an amendment).   Part of the reason for opposing the above was that Ambedkar was sceptical on the idea of India even being a nation! Here is his statement on the matter: “In believing we are a nation, we are cherishing great delusion. How can people divided into thousands of castes be a nation?” It was a worry shared by many others, though they would replace “castes” with “languages” and other regional differences. Therefore, believed Ambedkar, we needed a Constitution for a state, the groundwork to establish a nation. Only then could we hope that we would evolve into a nation someday. “The sooner we realize t...

While caught in Bangalore’s infamous traffic jams, Pranay Kotasthane stumbled upon yet another example of the unintended consequence of policy actions. Once upon a time, it was common for large trucks to be lumbering through city roads at all hours, including inevitably peak hours. So those heavy goods vehicles (HGV) were banned inside the city during busy hours. “The goal is simple and well-intentioned: reduce congestion, cut down on pollution, and make streets safer.”   Sadly, even such a well-intentioned policy has side-effects. “While the big, regulated trucks are kept at the outskirts, the demand for goods doesn't just disappear. Instead, it’s displaced onto a shadow fleet of smaller, faster, and unsafe vehicles.”   One half of that shadow fleet consists of “repurposed” agricultural vehicles. “Designed for low-speed farm work, they are dangerously unstable on paved roads.” But the bigger threat comes from the other half – the illegally modified mini-truck...

Simulating the world. Or a particular scenario. The ability to do this has enormous evolutionary benefits. To understand why, consider a creature which cannot simulate any aspect, writes Max Bennett in A Brief History of Intelligence . How would it learn anything? By trial and error. Costly in energy and time, let alone the risk angle.   But a creature which can simulate decently or better, well, it learns by “ vicarious trial and error” . Imagining what would happen with a choice rather than actually making that choice. So much more efficient and quicker.   A related aspect is counterfactual learning , i.e., imagining how things would have played out if a different choice had been made. Sadly, in humans at least, this ability has a side-effect we are all familiar with: regret . “We cannot change the past, so why torture ourselves with it?” Because it is an evolutionary habit that made sense for most of human history. For most of our species’ existence: “Such r...

Richard Feynman famously said: “You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”   We are all familiar with that problem. Sometimes people use fancy terms to impress other. But far more often, what people are really doing is using the jargon of their field, as Seth Godin points out : “If it’s important, conceptual or frequently discussed, there’s probably a domain-based word that experts understand. The precision of a special vocabulary allows them to do better work.”   Godin agrees with Feynman in that knowing the jargon doesn’t necessarily mean one is an expert in that domain. On the other hand: “If someone doesn’t know the word for it, it might be worth investigating what else they ...

Dignity. There is that (in)famous incident of Gandhi being thrown out from the first-class carriage of a train in South Africa. It led Gandhi to write that Indians had “become the untouchables of South Africa”, says Aakash Singh Rathore in Ambedkar’s Preamble .   It took a “real” untouchable, Ambedkar, to point out that the discrimination Indians faced abroad, while routine and condemnable, was a false analogy to what the untouchables faced in India. After all, pointed out Ambedkar, in South Africa, Gandhi was the boss of several white employees. He had whites as house guests, he dined with white South Africans, he owned property and handled significant amounts of money. Contrast that with what untouchables experienced and suffered back home, pointed out Ambedkar. Hence the charge of the false analogy. As Rathore says: “Only a visa got Dr Ambedkar out of this hostile land that was his homeland, so he could travel abroad, far from the dominion of Brahmanism, and only then enj...

Conditional reflexes. It is what an animal learns by repeated exposure. If a bell rings, then food is served, the dog will (over time) start salivating when the bell rings. Even before the food is served. What is strange is that such conditional learning does not need a brain. It even happens in creatures without brains. Brain or no brain, such learning is called acquired learning .   Say, you now start ringing the bell but don’t serve the food afterwards. For just a few days. As expected, over time, the animal will stop salivating when the bell rings. The association has been removed, a process called extinction . After those few days, you re-establish the bell-food sequence. The animal will start salivating again, a process called spontaneous recovery . Turns out the association was supressed , not deleted .   Next, you break the bell-food for a long time. Then after that long period, you restart the bell-food sequence. The animal will start salivating again. The s...

A couple of years back, China banned all coaching centers. The reason was exactly what many in India complain about – the competition to get into the best colleges is fierce, thus the rise of those coaching centers. But those centers are hard to afford to many plus they are only in the bigger cities. That means the kids of the already well off, urban folks are the only ones with a real shot of making it to the best colleges and then to better economic prospects.   While that reasoning makes sense, China (like India) has another problem, as this article explains . The quality of education in schools is not good. And their education too is exam oriented, not concept oriented. Teachers are gauged based on exam results, so they are incentivized to teach to the test (and in poorer areas, to cheat). The quality of education isn’t the same everywhere – the richer provinces do much better . Kids in the poorer provinces drop out of education much earlier. The per capita teacher count is...

Even before the ink was dry on the Constitution, Ambedkar worried whether the Constitution would survive. To make it stick, to make it impossible to subvert and overthrow, he believed “constitutional morality” had to take root, writes Aakash Singh Rathore in Ambedkar’s Preamble . In his famous appeal on that topic, Ambedkar cautioned: “Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realize our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.” That last part was a shot at the caste system. The democratic principle was equality, whereas the social principle was graded inequality. The former stood for liberty, the latter for fixed occupation.   Constitutional morality was a call to the public officials and public servants to, as Rathore puts it, “transcend the values and principles that they had been imbued with in Indian social life, and adopt the values and princ...

In the real world, “raw” signals are not continuous. Wind, water flow, stronger smells etc can all make signals short-lived. If a living thing were to only rely on such signals, it would give up way too soon.   It is to address these real-world constraints that certain neuromodulators arose, explains Max Bennett in A Brief History of Intelligence . Neuromodulators tune the neural activity across the entire brain, not just in neighbouring neurons. Not surprisingly, they have side-effects.   Dopamine is the neuromodulator that says “Keep going” even though the signal that initiated the action is no longer present. The principle behind it is as follows: if the animal got a whiff of food, it is probably nearby. If the signal soon stopped, it is probably because of a change in wind direction or other such variable. Continuing to look makes sense.   Dopamine, however, is not about liking something. It is all about wanting something. It is easy to understand th...

I first heard of Chesterton’s Fence in this Farnam Street blog . Say, there’s a fence. People can see a dozen problems with/due to the fence. Therefore they decide to bring it down. Here’s the problem with that approach: not one of them tried to “see the reason for its existence” first…   After all: “Fences don’t grow out of the ground, nor do people build them in their sleep or during a fit of madness… The reason might not be a good or relevant one; we just need to be aware of what the reason  is . Otherwise, we may end up with unintended consequences: second- and third-order effects we don’t want, spreading like ripples on a pond and causing damage for years.” A lot of interventions and changes fail because the above check wasn’t done.   The tendency to bring down age old “fences” is high. Sometimes, that’s a good thing, of course. But all too often, the reason behind the action isn’t great: “(Action is based on) the all-too-common belief that previou...

We hear a lot about how WhatsApp is used by small shop owners to run/increase their business. Dharmesh BA explores the limitations of this.   He starts with the tale of a guy running a beauty parlour. Ten years back, he could recommend Lakme sunscreen to a customer. No more. Women come to parlours with screenshots of Korean skincare brands seen on Instagram. If the parlour didn’t have it, they left. How could he possibly have every such brand? The solution? He joined a WhatsApp vendor group – wholesalers posting pics of various products. Our parlour owner would post some of those pics to his customer group – and order the ones in which his customers showed interest. “He wasn’t using WhatsApp for communication and marketing alone but turned it into a just-in-time inventory system.” ~~   Did you know there are 3 variants of WhatsApp? The one which you and I use. There’s WhatsApp Business which small businesses use with catalogs and auto-replies to customer chats. ...

Fraternity. This should be an uncontroversial word in a constitution or preamble, right? But it was not the case, explains Aakash Singh Rathore in Ambedkar’s Preamble . In 1948, Ambedkar introduced this clause: “Fraternity, assuring the dignity of every individual without distinction of caste or creed.” The left-leaning members of the drafting committee were not happy with it. For them, class conflict was the greater problem, not caste conflict, so they wanted “class” to be part of the clause. The right, on the other hand, wanted emphasis on the nation (building) aspect in the clause.   Ambedkar yielded to both groups and the updated clause read: “Fraternity, without distinction of caste, class or creed, so as to assure the dignity of every individual and the unity of the Nation.”   But the Objective Resolution had no mention for fraternity. The Drafting Committee got nervous – were they flirting with danger by not following something framed by Nehru and the Cong...

In Silicon Valley, the big tech companies copy each other whenever one of them makes a big bet on some new tech. When Google took the plunge into deep learning, Facebook and Microsoft followed. Even though they had no idea what they might do with it ! The reason they jumped in was FOMO – fear of missing out. The risk of not getting into any new tech was viewed as an existential one. They didn’t want to be like the companies from a generation back that ignored the possibilities of the Internet and got run over by new Internet based upstarts.   Since they had no clear uses, both Facebook and Microsoft initially struggled to woo the top deep learning folks in academia to join their companies. In both cases, the CEO’s, Mark Zuckerburg and Satya Nadella, had to personally meet and convince prospective employees that they’d find applications later, but they’d support it in their R&D departments until then, that they’d pour far more money in their R&D labs than what any university...

Animals have one of two kinds of symmetry – radial or bilateral, points out Max Bennett in A Brief History of Intelligence .   Animals started by having radial symmetry. Why then did so many diverge into bilateral symmetry? Simple answer: Radial symmetry works fine if the approach is to wait for food. But it is a terrible setup if you want to navigate towards food. He expands on that.   A creature with radial symmetry would detect signals from and move in all directions. Bilateral symmetry, on the other hand, is designed for movement in two directions – ahead and left/right. The former is very complicated; the latter is so much simpler. (Which is why human engineers have designed everything that moves with bilateral symmetry – cars, planes, submarines).   While simpler on one front, bilateralism creates a new need – a decision-making capability . Which direction should one move in? Thus, all bilaterals, even the tiniest ones, have brains. Two rules are the min...

Every generation of teenagers comes up new slang that they use. It rarely involves coining new words (how would anyone understand a new word anyway?). Rather, it involves coining abbreviations (FR = for real) and acronyms for commonly used phrases; or using existing words to mean something else; or changing the form of an existing word to mean something (“adulting” = doing things an adult would do, a derogatory phrase meaning you are old and responsible (cringe)).   The reasons for this lingo are the usual. A sense of identity (distinct from adults in particular). Independence. Belonging within their peer groups. Code for certain commonly felt emotions.   I overhear a lot of this lingo when my 14 yo daughter talks to her friends. Of course, she isn’t keen to explain any of that slang to me. And even if she does explain it, she will insist I use it all wrong. And that I should stop trying to use such slang – I am not cool enough for it.   That, of course, is wh...

The concept of swaraj in the independence movement annoyed Ambedkar. Aakash Singh Rathore explains why in Ambedkar’s Preamble . With Gandhi leading the movement, the concept of freedom/independence had begun to take almost spiritual tones. For many (usually upper castes), spiritual is different from religious. For someone like Ambedkar, an untouchable, this was a distinction without a difference. What was the point of independence, he asked, if it would only result in the continuance of Brahmanical Hinduism (and oppression of the lower castes)?   The untouchables had good reason to be wary. They had hoped that the British would be their liberators. But the British had preserved the old social system and the exclusion of the untouchables from social and civic life continued. Ambedkar was determined that freedom from the British should not mean a continuation of the exclusion of the untouchables by the new (Indian) rulers.   Gandhian swaraj , contended Ambedkar, stoppe...

How do neurons work? Max Bennett explains in A Brief History of Intelligence . Edgar Adrian made 3 key findings on the topic in the 1920’s, for which he would win the Nobel Prize.   First , he found that neurons don’t send electric signals continuously. Rather, they fire all-or-nothing responses. On or Off, nothing in between. This raised a problematic question. Our senses can differentiate between levels of volume, strength of smells, amount of light etc. How could a simple On/Off-only mechanism convey shades?   To answer that question, Adrian took a muscle from the neck of a dead frog and attached a recording device to a single stretch-sensing neuron in that muscle. Then he did his experiment: how would the neuron convey different weights? Here is what his recording device noted:   The strength of the spike (On) did not vary with the weight. But the frequency of the spikes was proportional to the weight – higher the weight, higher the frequency of the spike...

When the constitution was being framed, many of the members pointed out it was not assigning importance to the village as a unit of governance. Wasn’t that violating Gandhi’s view and input, they asked.   Aakash Singh Rathore’s Ambedkar’s Preamble goes into that. As mentioned in an earlier blog, Ambedkar had fallen out with Gandhi over the forced 1932 Poona Pact where he had to give up on the reservation of constituencies for the lower castes. Ambedkar was dead against the village as the smallest unit of governance because the “village is a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism”.   Several members objected to this. Wasn’t this a violation of the principle of local governance, they asked. Ambedkar stood his ground pointing to Gandhi’s own admission, that “You will not understand me if you think about the villages of today… My villages… exist in my imagination”. For an uber-pragmatist like Ambedkar, governance systems could not be based...

A Brief History of Intelligence is written by an AI engineer who studied the brain! So why did Max Bennett study the brain? “The relations between AI and the brain goes both ways, while the brain can surely teach us about how to create artificial humanlike intelligence, AI can also teach us about the brain.” He clarifies early: it is the human brain he is referring to, not brains in general. He starts from the beginning, from the evolution of neurons .   Fungus. It is closer to animals than plants. How? Because fungus cannot do photosynthesis; it takes in food and oxygen. Yet one lineage (animals) went on to develop brains whereas the other (fungi) didn’t. Why the difference?   Well, animals and fungi adopted different strategies for food – animals kill (plants or other animals) and then digest food inside themselves. Fungi wait for things to die and then digest them outside their body. Fungi use a spray-and-pray approach – they spray trillions of singled ...