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Noise #1: What is it?

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Errors in judgment. There are two causes for it: bias, and “noise”. In their book titled Noise , the authors start off by explaining what “noise” means in this context. Say 4 teams, A, B, C, and D go to a shooting range:   Team A is on target. B is “biased” (off-target but in a very consistent way). C and D are inconsistent – they are what is called “noisy”.   In the real world though, for most judgments, one doesn’t know what the target is. Or who missed and by how much. If that sounded wrong, consider a few scenarios of what the authors mean: Which movie should be made? Which candidate should be hired? What is the right premium for the insurance policy? In these scenarios, what exactly is the right answer? And how do you even gauge if the decision was wrong: after all, each of the decisions could go wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with poor judgment e.g. a freak earthquake, or a personal event in the employee’s life that derails his professional life.   Which is
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Interoperable Systems and the Government

Why are Bob Kahn and Vincent Cerf considered the “inventors of the Internet”? Long, long ago, as computer networks started to get created, they were initially limited to universities and military installations in the US, writes Mitchell Waldrop in The Dream Machine . Further, two different networks could not communicate with each other. Why not? Because they worked on different hardware, had computers that ran different OS’s, application software was written in different programming languages, and most importantly the protocol used for communication within a network was not standardized – each network followed its own method to communicate, so no two networks could communicate with each other.   In such a setup, vendors had no incentive to make things compatible with each other. In fact, corporations (who were major customers) considered the lack of compatibility a feature , not a bug! Why? Because they feared security leaks and industrial espionage. Thus, if a rival corporate n
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Nuclear Weapon Policies

Why has India adopted a no-first-use policy wrt its nuclear weapons? Shivshankar Menon looks into the reasons in his book, Choices . (Incidentally, India’s assurance that it won’t use or threaten others by its nuclear weapons is limited to (1) non-nuclear weapon countries, and (2) countries not aligned to nuclear powers).   Consider the alternative, he says: a declared first-use-if-needed policy. It’s what the US, Russia, and Pakistan have. America has it because that’s the only way to guarantee the security umbrella it provides to Japan, South Korea and much of western Europe. But once the US takes that policy, USSR/Russia has no choice but to adopt the same policy. Pakistan has it because of their paranoia of India and their weakness in conventional military strength.   Menon points out that the alternative, first-use-if-needed policy, is destabilizing by definition. It sets off guessing games as to when such a country might fire its nukes, what they might consider as suffic
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Things to Ponder

The national budget gets a lot of coverage and analysis. While the state budgets hardly get covered or analyzed. Even though 60% of government spending happens through our states. This fraction is even higher for higher income states.   Karnataka’s (state) GDP is $340 billion. What steps should it take to become a $1 trillion economy? How much does the state spend on Bangalore v/s how much does it get from Bangalore? Obviously this wouldn’t be of interest for national media, but surely it should be for state media?   I am curious whether this problem of coverage is limited to the English media alone? Or is it a problem with the regional language media too? ~~   It’s a common complaint about how little parliament meets – we’re not talking of individual MP’s attendance, this is about how many days parliament is convened. In case you wondered, it’s 60 days per year. And so much of that gets washed away in shouting each other down, or boycotting sessions. But compared to th
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Digital Transformation of India

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In 2023, Nandan Nilekani, the man behind Infosys, Aadhar and India Stack, made a presentation on India’s digital transformation that has grown viral in recent times.   In 2008, we had the world’s most “unbanked” population, i.e., folks without bank accounts. History shows that the fraction of the population with bank accounts is a function of how it rich it is. By 2017, 80% of the population had bank accounts despite the per capita GDP still being low. (For comparison, 80% coverage is usually achieved when a country’s per capita GDP is around 10 times ours.)   How did that happen? Two critical factors were the dropping prices of smartphones and the even sharper drop in the price of Internet data costs. In turn, those two factors caused India’s digital payments to take off. The convenience of digital payments further drove the rise of bank accounts. Which then set off another virtuous cycle – subsidies and cash benefits could be transferred directly to recipients with no midd
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Realignments

The Russia-Ukraine war has probably created a “major shift in the world order”, writes Amit Kumar. On the one hand, the US and Europe have moved closer to each other.   On the other side, how close have Russia and China moved to each other? This is a particularly worrying question for India, he writes, because “one of India’s historically most trusted partners now possibly shares an indispensable friendship with India’s primary adversary”.   Russia and China have several points of convergence: “The first point of convergence between China and Russia emanates from their shared antipathy for the US-dominated economic order and financial system. Both countries have been subject to a range of Western economic sanctions and export restrictions.”   Russia as the oil source addresses another critical fear of China. Oil from the Middle East has to go through the Indian Ocean, a route which can be blocked (in times of war). Conversely, China as the new consumer of Russian oil helps Russia nega
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The Choices

What is the appeal of a guy like Trump? The American Left’s “answer” to that question – white supremist, racism, gynophobia, xenophobia - never felt satisfying to me. While some fraction of his supporters definitely fall in those categories, surely not half of the country. How could half the country have turned into those things within months of Trump running for power the first time?   Andrew Sullivan’s post provided another answer, one which feels more likely. The one-line summary of it: “Trump has grasped some core truths of our time.” He expands on that.   First , immigrants in America. A part of that problem is the (relative) ease with which the Democrats want to grant even illegal immigrants eventual citizenship. But more than that, it is the change in who qualifies for asylum. In the Cold War era, asylum seekers were mostly to those escaping communism. This set was relatively small and thus manageable (most escapees went to Western Europe, not America); and American
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