Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Charlie Munger once talked about the work one should put in before forming an opinion: “ Ask yourself what are the arguments on the other side. It’s bad to have an opinion you’re proud of if you can’t state the arguments for the other side better than your opponents. This is a great mental discipline.” That is very good advice indeed. Sadly, it is also very hard to follow. That is probably why most people with a strong opinion rarely know of any merits in the opposing view. And so they take to name calling and like to think of themselves as morally superior. No, that doesn’t just apply to politicians and fanatics. It applies to most people we know, probably (shudder) even ourselves. Sure, the degrees may be vastly different across groups or individuals, but very few people take the actual effort of going as far as Munger advised. Or if they do, they just pick the worst possible motive they can think of for the opposing view (bigot, racist, religious fanatic, greedy, ...

Charlie Hebdo is back. The Huffington Post reports : “The cover shows the Prophet Muhammad holding a “Je Suis Charlie” sign with the caption, “All is forgiven.” The newspaper said that it will print over 1 million copies this week, with financial help from Google, Le Monde and other organizations. It usually prints around 60,000.” Imagine that: 60,000 went to 10 million! As Stephen Fry points out : “Had the brothers stayed their bloody hands it would have been 60,000 at the very most. Mohammed must be very cross indeed that his two cretinous representatives have spread the ‘insults’ so unimaginably far and wide.” Of course, not all of these new found “supporters” of Charlie Hebdo are exactly saints or angels. Daniel Wickham fired off tweets on “some of the staunch defenders of the free press attending the solidarity rally in Paris”. His barbs list included King Abdullah of Jordan, Turkey’s PM (“which imprisons more journalists than any other country in the world”), th...