Viswanathan K's Thoughts

When we find someone being dishonest or unscrupulous, we wonder how they can be that way? How do they sleep at night? Is their conscience dead? I never could think of an answer that made sense. Most answers just seem to be phrased to make you feel morally superior! Which is why I found a couple of passages from Dan Ariely’s book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves ) more believable. But let’s start with what Nassim Taleb called the narrative fallacy: the human tendency to build a story around events so they “make sense”. Ariely extended this tendency to describe how most of us think: “We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.” Ariely goes on to argue that a creative person is better than others at coming u...

How far should one take the freedom of speech? India goes to one extreme: just think of how we ban anything and everything the moment any random person says it offends him. Salman Rushdie’s book, MF Hussain’s paintings, Danish cartoons, the list is endless. Vir Sanghvi wrote that that freedom of speech is really the freedom to offend . That doesn’t sound right at first, but Sanghvi’s went something like this: Isn’t freedom of speech the right of the speaker to say what he wishes, criticize who he wants? Otherwise, the way we yield to every radical group, aren’t we treating it as the right of the listener to not be offended by what others say? Most countries that allow freedom of speech include the right to lie under its purview. Before you get all moralistic about it, consider taking things to an extreme and making all forms of lieing illegal. You’d then be stuck with having to differentiate the guy who lied knowingly from the guy who genuinely (but mistakenly) thought something w...