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Preamble #6: "Constitutional Morality"

Even before the ink was dry on the Constitution, Ambedkar worried whether the Constitution would survive. To make it stick, to make it impossible to subvert and overthrow, he believed “constitutional morality” had to take root, writes Aakash Singh Rathore in Ambedkar’s Preamble . In his famous appeal on that topic, Ambedkar cautioned: “Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realize our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.” That last part was a shot at the caste system. The democratic principle was equality, whereas the social principle was graded inequality. The former stood for liberty, the latter for fixed occupation.   Constitutional morality was a call to the public officials and public servants to, as Rathore puts it, “transcend the values and principles that they had been imbued with in Indian social life, and adopt the values and princ...
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Neuromodulators, Benefits and Side-effects

In the real world, “raw” signals are not continuous. Wind, water flow, stronger smells etc can all make signals short-lived. If a living thing were to only rely on such signals, it would give up way too soon.   It is to address these real-world constraints that certain neuromodulators arose, explains Max Bennett in A Brief History of Intelligence . Neuromodulators tune the neural activity across the entire brain, not just in neighbouring neurons. Not surprisingly, they have side-effects.   Dopamine is the neuromodulator that says “Keep going” even though the signal that initiated the action is no longer present. The principle behind it is as follows: if the animal got a whiff of food, it is probably nearby. If the signal soon stopped, it is probably because of a change in wind direction or other such variable. Continuing to look makes sense.   Dopamine, however, is not about liking something. It is all about wanting something. It is easy to understand th...
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Chesterton's Fence

I first heard of Chesterton’s Fence in this Farnam Street blog . Say, there’s a fence. People can see a dozen problems with/due to the fence. Therefore they decide to bring it down. Here’s the problem with that approach: not one of them tried to “see the reason for its existence” first…   After all: “Fences don’t grow out of the ground, nor do people build them in their sleep or during a fit of madness… The reason might not be a good or relevant one; we just need to be aware of what the reason  is . Otherwise, we may end up with unintended consequences: second- and third-order effects we don’t want, spreading like ripples on a pond and causing damage for years.” A lot of interventions and changes fail because the above check wasn’t done.   The tendency to bring down age old “fences” is high. Sometimes, that’s a good thing, of course. But all too often, the reason behind the action isn’t great: “(Action is based on) the all-too-common belief that previou...
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Indian Small Businesses and WhatsApp

We hear a lot about how WhatsApp is used by small shop owners to run/increase their business. Dharmesh BA explores the limitations of this.   He starts with the tale of a guy running a beauty parlour. Ten years back, he could recommend Lakme sunscreen to a customer. No more. Women come to parlours with screenshots of Korean skincare brands seen on Instagram. If the parlour didn’t have it, they left. How could he possibly have every such brand? The solution? He joined a WhatsApp vendor group – wholesalers posting pics of various products. Our parlour owner would post some of those pics to his customer group – and order the ones in which his customers showed interest. “He wasn’t using WhatsApp for communication and marketing alone but turned it into a just-in-time inventory system.” ~~   Did you know there are 3 variants of WhatsApp? The one which you and I use. There’s WhatsApp Business which small businesses use with catalogs and auto-replies to customer chats. ...
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Preamble #5: Fraternity

Fraternity. This should be an uncontroversial word in a constitution or preamble, right? But it was not the case, explains Aakash Singh Rathore in Ambedkar’s Preamble . In 1948, Ambedkar introduced this clause: “Fraternity, assuring the dignity of every individual without distinction of caste or creed.” The left-leaning members of the drafting committee were not happy with it. For them, class conflict was the greater problem, not caste conflict, so they wanted “class” to be part of the clause. The right, on the other hand, wanted emphasis on the nation (building) aspect in the clause.   Ambedkar yielded to both groups and the updated clause read: “Fraternity, without distinction of caste, class or creed, so as to assure the dignity of every individual and the unity of the Nation.”   But the Objective Resolution had no mention for fraternity. The Drafting Committee got nervous – were they flirting with danger by not following something framed by Nehru and the Cong...
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FOMO and Deep Learning

In Silicon Valley, the big tech companies copy each other whenever one of them makes a big bet on some new tech. When Google took the plunge into deep learning, Facebook and Microsoft followed. Even though they had no idea what they might do with it ! The reason they jumped in was FOMO – fear of missing out. The risk of not getting into any new tech was viewed as an existential one. They didn’t want to be like the companies from a generation back that ignored the possibilities of the Internet and got run over by new Internet based upstarts.   Since they had no clear uses, both Facebook and Microsoft initially struggled to woo the top deep learning folks in academia to join their companies. In both cases, the CEO’s, Mark Zuckerburg and Satya Nadella, had to personally meet and convince prospective employees that they’d find applications later, but they’d support it in their R&D departments until then, that they’d pour far more money in their R&D labs than what any university...
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Symmetry, Steering and the Brain

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Animals have one of two kinds of symmetry – radial or bilateral, points out Max Bennett in A Brief History of Intelligence .   Animals started by having radial symmetry. Why then did so many diverge into bilateral symmetry? Simple answer: Radial symmetry works fine if the approach is to wait for food. But it is a terrible setup if you want to navigate towards food. He expands on that.   A creature with radial symmetry would detect signals from and move in all directions. Bilateral symmetry, on the other hand, is designed for movement in two directions – ahead and left/right. The former is very complicated; the latter is so much simpler. (Which is why human engineers have designed everything that moves with bilateral symmetry – cars, planes, submarines).   While simpler on one front, bilateralism creates a new need – a decision-making capability . Which direction should one move in? Thus, all bilaterals, even the tiniest ones, have brains. Two rules are the min...
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