Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In one of the tales in Nitin Pai’s Nitopadesha , an elephant sees a tiger getting ready to attack a deer and its fawn. If she thumped the ground, the deer and her fawn could escape. But that would mean the tiger would instead attack a stag on the other side. The question of the story: what should the elephant do? Either choice would mean the death of someone.   The tale takes us through the way one would assess. Is saving two lives better than saving one? But saving two lives means sentencing the stag to death – who gave the elephant the authority to decide that? Round and round the arguments go. The moment one has an argument for one, there is a counterargument for the other. We might have the luxury of time, but the elephant has to make a choice within moments. Worst of all, not making a choice still leads to the deer’s death.   No, it’s not a Vikram - Vetaal story with a right answer. Instead, the moral is to remind us that governance is hard and involves such decisions. ...

Elon Musk, remember, is always on multiple projects companies at any given instant. Of the time he spends on any company, he spends 80-90% of his time on the engineering questions, writes Eric Berger in Liftoff . Since he is also the guy who is funding the company, Musk says: “Normally those are at least two people. There’s some engineering guy who’s trying to convince a finance guy that the money should be spent. But the finance guy doesn’t understand engineering, so he can’t tell if this is a good way to spend the money… Whereas I am making the engineering decisions and spending decisions.”   Of course, some decisions went wrong. Like the time he OK’ed aluminium nuts instead of steel ones because they were lighter – “with rockets, every ounce matters”. But the aluminium nut had not been able to tolerate the continuous salt water spray from the ocean when the rocket was being prep’ed, setting off a cascading set of problems that caused the rocket flight to be aborted mid-fl...

Michael Lewis, author of books like Liar’s Poker , profiled Obama recently and I found the part about Obama’s comments on making decisions all the time was interesting. So many people complain about having too many choices, too many decisions to make, so how does Obama deal with it? After all, his decisions have far bigger impact than what most people do. One of the things Obama does is to cut down on personal decisions. Like what to wear or what to eat. Why does he do that? “Because I have too many other decisions to make”! So if he’s making that many other decisions, then why not also decide what to eat or how to dress? Apparently, Obama believes in research that found the act of making a decision degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. So he felt he should conserve his decision making for the important things only. Now combine the fact that his job is to make decisions, and he doesn’t want to “waste” that on trivial things: how does he achieve it? By routinizing himself...