Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In The Golden Road , William Dalrymple mentions something strange - No Buddhist text or inscription survives from the times before Ashoka and Kalinga. (Dalrymple snarkily contrasts Ashoka’s “I am sorry” with other rulers from that time to present day, who will never acknowledge a mistake or express regret). But once Ashoka embraced Buddhism, a “waterfall” of records cascade from Kandahar to the Deccan. Ashoka was to Buddhism’s spread what Constantine was to Christianity’s, he writes.   But post-Ashoka, Buddhism never spread by any ruler’s recommendation or by the sword. “Instead, perhaps counter-intuitively for a faith that embraced poverty and renunciation as an ideal, it was spread around the globe most effectively by wealthy merchants engaged in trade.” For many Buddhists, wealth “could be taken as a sign of good karma ” and “poverty could be interpreted as a sign of moral failure”!   At the famous caves of Ajanta, the Buddha is shown less in his “monastic mil...

There is this joke about a dairy farmer wanting to maximize his cow’s milk production. So the farmer goes to a physicist who comes back with a stack of impressive looking equations and says, “Well, first assume a spherical cow…”   At first sight, it just sounds like yet another theoretical simplification to the point of absurdity. But there is a lot to this “spherical-cow philosophy”, writes Sean Carroll in The Biggest Ideas in the Universe 1 . Specifically in how physics is done: “Idealize a difficult problem down to a simple one by ignoring as many complications as you can. Get an answer to the simple problem. Then put the complications back in and calculate how they affect the answer to the simple problem.”   Physics is famous for this method e.g. ignore friction, build an idea, then add friction into it. For no apparent reason, this technique works in physics. Even though it obviously does not work in so many other fields: “In fields like biology and economic...

A t work, I remember being told to remember that we had translate our English UI to both Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. Separately – the two were that different. While reading Gaston Dorren’s Babel , I learnt that while the vocabulary is 99% common, the pronunciations are seriously different, so much so that it not even the same language anymore!   Dorren still counts them as one though (#7, 275 million speaker). Most of his chapter on Portuguese is about a question he asks himself: Why did Portuguese spread across the world (remember, it is 7 th in the most spoken languages list)? Whereas Dutch language hardly spread?   In fact, neither power tried actively to instill their language in their colonies (the French put a lot more effort on that front; and it never yielded proportional results. French is #10, 250 million). Nor is Portuguese an easier language to learn in any way (it is as hard or easy as any foreign language).   One reason is where they ...

Does the advent of AI mean we need new laws and regulations? When I read two of Rahul Matthan’s posts, I realize they are entirely different questions. The same answer need not apply to both!   Take the laws aspect first . Consider fake news, he says. AI can generate fake content, both audio and video. Does this mean we need new laws? Surprisingly, no. We already have existing laws to cover all this (impersonation of others is a crime; so is harming someone’s reputation). Or consider how AI can be used to trigger communal tensions. Already a crime, covered under the law on using electronic communications to promote disharmony and enmity. Matthan says there is a reason why we can find existing laws for most scenarios: “Pretty much any harm that you think is exacerbated by AI—be it misleading advertising, election interference, forgery or bias—is covered by existing provisions of law. In almost every instance, since these laws have been drafted so broadly as to cover a wide ra...

Admission tests for new kids at my 13 yo daughter’s school are held in a way where the existing and prospective kids can see each other, even talk to each other (if they want to). The parents of the prospective kid can walk round the school, and check out the facilities after the test.   The existing kids have this tendency to evaluate the prospective kids for their “worthiness” – could they be members of their gang, should they be selected. Unsurprisingly, all new kids will be dismissed as un-cool, ugly or stupid and totally unworthy of joining the exalted ranks of the Cool Gang.   Recently, there was this fat girl who took this entrance test. After the test, as her parents went round the school, they spoke to the Sports teacher and said that the girl played basketball. One of the Cool Gang smirked, “ She plays basketball? Does she play the role of the ball ?”. To which another responded, “She’s a size 20, we only use size 7 balls here”. Uproarious laughter ensued. O...

When the state doesn’t have the capacity to deliver services to all and/or its quality is poor, it is inevitable that private players will emerge for some fraction of those services – water delivery, security guards, hospitals, schools etc.   Having a mix of private and public service provider makes things murky, says Karthik Muralidharan in Accelerating India’s Development . How? Because the government then plays policymaker, regulator, and service provider. These roles are often contradictory, which creates confusion and accusations of bias.   We tend to confuse qualifications with quality. But both the education and health sectors prove this wrong – the private sector qualifications in both are lower, yet they produce better outcomes. Why? The carrot (bonuses) and stick (job insecurity) approach of the private sector drives greater effort. The correlation of effort to outcome is far higher than that of qualification to outcome.   The private and public sect...

The largest Austronesian language is Malay (#9, 275 million speakers), spoken in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore. Gaston Dorren’s Babel on Malay focuses on Indonesia because it is a segue into an interesting question. In countries with multiple pre-existing languages, which one dominates? Is there a pattern? (In case you were wondering, Indonesia, spread over a thousand islands, has over 700 languages. Yet, the adoption of Malay as the official language has never created problems.)     Group 1 are countries with one clear dominant language e.g. Saudi Arabia, the Koreas, Bangladesh. These are no-brainers in the choice of language. At the other end of the spectrum is Group 4 – a lot of languages, with one as the largest spoken one but nowhere near an absolute majority e.g. Philippines and many African countries. Here, any one language is unlikely to dominate since the others can unify in protest. They usually pick a former colonial language as the VIL (Very Imp...