Viswanathan K's Thoughts

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...

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. ...

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...

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...

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...

Every generation of teenagers comes up new slang that they use. It rarely involves coining new words (how would anyone understand a new word anyway?). Rather, it involves coining abbreviations (FR = for real) and acronyms for commonly used phrases; or using existing words to mean something else; or changing the form of an existing word to mean something (“adulting” = doing things an adult would do, a derogatory phrase meaning you are old and responsible (cringe)).   The reasons for this lingo are the usual. A sense of identity (distinct from adults in particular). Independence. Belonging within their peer groups. Code for certain commonly felt emotions.   I overhear a lot of this lingo when my 14 yo daughter talks to her friends. Of course, she isn’t keen to explain any of that slang to me. And even if she does explain it, she will insist I use it all wrong. And that I should stop trying to use such slang – I am not cool enough for it.   That, of course, is wh...

The concept of swaraj in the independence movement annoyed Ambedkar. Aakash Singh Rathore explains why in Ambedkar’s Preamble . With Gandhi leading the movement, the concept of freedom/independence had begun to take almost spiritual tones. For many (usually upper castes), spiritual is different from religious. For someone like Ambedkar, an untouchable, this was a distinction without a difference. What was the point of independence, he asked, if it would only result in the continuance of Brahmanical Hinduism (and oppression of the lower castes)?   The untouchables had good reason to be wary. They had hoped that the British would be their liberators. But the British had preserved the old social system and the exclusion of the untouchables from social and civic life continued. Ambedkar was determined that freedom from the British should not mean a continuation of the exclusion of the untouchables by the new (Indian) rulers.   Gandhian swaraj , contended Ambedkar, stoppe...

How do neurons work? Max Bennett explains in A Brief History of Intelligence . Edgar Adrian made 3 key findings on the topic in the 1920’s, for which he would win the Nobel Prize.   First , he found that neurons don’t send electric signals continuously. Rather, they fire all-or-nothing responses. On or Off, nothing in between. This raised a problematic question. Our senses can differentiate between levels of volume, strength of smells, amount of light etc. How could a simple On/Off-only mechanism convey shades?   To answer that question, Adrian took a muscle from the neck of a dead frog and attached a recording device to a single stretch-sensing neuron in that muscle. Then he did his experiment: how would the neuron convey different weights? Here is what his recording device noted:   The strength of the spike (On) did not vary with the weight. But the frequency of the spikes was proportional to the weight – higher the weight, higher the frequency of the spike...

When the constitution was being framed, many of the members pointed out it was not assigning importance to the village as a unit of governance. Wasn’t that violating Gandhi’s view and input, they asked.   Aakash Singh Rathore’s Ambedkar’s Preamble goes into that. As mentioned in an earlier blog, Ambedkar had fallen out with Gandhi over the forced 1932 Poona Pact where he had to give up on the reservation of constituencies for the lower castes. Ambedkar was dead against the village as the smallest unit of governance because the “village is a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism”.   Several members objected to this. Wasn’t this a violation of the principle of local governance, they asked. Ambedkar stood his ground pointing to Gandhi’s own admission, that “You will not understand me if you think about the villages of today… My villages… exist in my imagination”. For an uber-pragmatist like Ambedkar, governance systems could not be based...

A Brief History of Intelligence is written by an AI engineer who studied the brain! So why did Max Bennett study the brain? “The relations between AI and the brain goes both ways, while the brain can surely teach us about how to create artificial humanlike intelligence, AI can also teach us about the brain.” He clarifies early: it is the human brain he is referring to, not brains in general. He starts from the beginning, from the evolution of neurons .   Fungus. It is closer to animals than plants. How? Because fungus cannot do photosynthesis; it takes in food and oxygen. Yet one lineage (animals) went on to develop brains whereas the other (fungi) didn’t. Why the difference?   Well, animals and fungi adopted different strategies for food – animals kill (plants or other animals) and then digest food inside themselves. Fungi wait for things to die and then digest them outside their body. Fungi use a spray-and-pray approach – they spray trillions of singled ...

The root of the “lifelong feud” between Ambedkar and Gandhi is described in Aakash Singh Rathore’s Ambedkar’s Preamble . In 1930, Ambedkar represented the “depressed classes” (the term for the lower castes) at the Round Table Conference in London and did an outstanding job. In 1932, his continuous efforts yielded results – a scheme for separate electorates for the untouchables (In present-day speak, that means constituencies reserved for the untouchables).   Gandhi resorted to a fast-onto-death against the decision, which put Ambedkar in an impossible situation. “Blackmailed into it, Dr Ambedkar signed a pact with Gandhi in 1932, with terms that were quite disagreeable to him.” It was from this point (the 1932 Poona Pact) that Ambedkar would characterize Gandhi not as a Mahatma, but as a dangerous opponent, famously describing this episode as one where Gandhi “showed me his fangs”.   Why was Gandhi so opposed to such a reservation? The book doesn’t say, but here is...

Neural networks. Deep learning. This is the “how” behind what we see as AI (artificial intelligence) around us today, from Alexa’s voice recognition to Google’s image search to your smartphone’s ability to unlock based on your face. While these algorithms are very powerful indeed, they are also mysterious…   “Mysterious”? What does that even mean? Simply put, we don’t understand how they conclude what they conclude. It’s not as if someone wrote specific software instructions on how to recognize a dog. Rather, a huge set of data is provided as input with tags like “dog” and “not dog”. The system goes over the data and self-discovers which patterns correspond to a dog. Remember that old joke on computers as GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out)? That joke was based on instructions we keyed into a computer (type the wrong instruction, you get the wrong result). With AI, GIGO now means something else – feed it the wrong data and/or wrong tags as input, and the patterns the system learn...

The preamble to the constitution. That’s the topic of Aakash Singh Rathore’s Ambedkar’s Preamble . Not the entire constitution, just the preamble. Why a book on just the preamble? The author explains: “The ideas and principles behind a clause can be more important than the mere mechanics of the clause itself.”   It starts with something we don’t even notice this: “WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA… IN OUR CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY this twenty-sixth day of November, 1949, do HEREBY ADOPT, ENACT AND GIVE TO OURSELVES THIS CONSTITUTION.” Not 26 January, 1950 (our Republic Day). Instead, 26 November 1949. And if it was ready on that earlier day, why did our Republic Day have to be later?   Therein lies a tale. In 1929, the Congress’ National Session made a call for complete independence. A while later, Gandhi published an article on 26 January 1930 saying India would settle for nothing less than “complete independence”. It was as a callback to that Gandhian demand that the coun...

The last pillar of India’s DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure) is privacy . We take that to mean control over who knows what, whether that info can be shared with others, for how long it can be retained etc. Yes, privacy is all those things.   But India’s DEPA takes it a lot further, explains Rahul Matthan in The Third Way . It actively seeks to ensure portability (Unlike those private corporations which deliberately have data is in non-standard formats to prevent interoperability). Even better, DEPA has “been designed to support requests for specific items of data ”. An example helps. When we apply for say a visa, the issuing country really only wants to know if we earn enough (salary month on month). But the bank statement exposes every transaction. The DEPA framework allows you to select only salary credits be shown and everything else blacked out.   The next issue with privacy is consent , i.e., explicit permission of the individual. In theory, the solution lie...

Eugene Wei makes some interesting points on the topic of copying the work of others. Quite often, it isn’t just copying – rather, what’s being “copied” serves as the inspiration: “Isn't this how innovation happens? We stand on the shoulder of giants and all that? Good artists copy, great artists steal?” In case you’re wondering, that last line (on what artists do) is by Steve Jobs.   If a work of literature (or parts of it) is copied, we rightly call it plagiarism. But interestingly, in the world of business, an old idea can be copied and tried again (as long as it doesn’t violate copyrights, patents and trademarks). How’s that? In layman English, we say an idea was ahead of its time. In business parlance, it’s called “product-market fit” mismatch – a product, like an idea, that is too ahead of its time won’t succeed. Which is why the same product/idea relaunched later might succeed: “One day, the conditions are finally right, and an idea that has failed ten times before...

In Range , David Epstein argues that the “ability to integrate broadly” is our greatest strength. Which is the “exact opposite of narrow specialization”. If we narrowly know only one area very well, we tend to look and find only the “same old patterns”. But: “In the wicked world, with ill-defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack.”   Most problems in a field can be solved by specialists in that field. That’s to be expected. But when experts in a field get stuck, quite often we see outsiders with a broad range of knowledge of multiple fields (even if they’re not specialists in most of those fields) finding solutions. Why/how? “The outside view probes for deep structural similarities to the current problem in different ones. The outside view is deeply counterintuitive because it requires a decision maker to ignore unique surface features of the current project, on which they are the expert, and instead look outside for structurally similar analogies.” ...

When we think of online retail in India, we think of Amazon and Flipkart. Which is why I found this article by Manish Singh so informative: “ Flipkart and Amazon’s displacement is coming from two directions simultaneously.”   The first of those are the urban “instant delivery” firms. Think Blinkit, Swiggy’s Instamart and Zepto. The second one are e-commerce sites aimed at the smaller cities and towns. “ Amazon and Flipkart now find themselves squeezed between two models they cannot easily replicate because their expensive infrastructure, designed for catalogue breadth and next-day delivery, proves ill-suited for either 10-minute deliveries in dense urban areas or ultra-low-price commerce in India’s interior.”   I won’t spend much time on the instant delivery firms since we (in urban centers) are very familiar with their speed and convenience.   I will talk more on the e-commerce sites for smaller cities and towns. Meesho is what few of us have ever used...

Another design principle of India’s DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure) is protocols . As opposed to platforms. This needs some explanation, as done by Rahul Matthan in The Third Way . A platform (like Facebook or YouTube) provides a forum where anyone can post material but there are no guarantees on what will be permitted (or how the rules could change with time). A protocol, on the other hand, is a set of rules that are defined upfront so all participants know what is allowed and expected.   The DPI’s protocol model means any participant can create entirely new applications that nobody had thought of, as long as they follow the protocols. This allows for enormous creativity and evolution of applications over time.   And lastly, since protocols are rules, regulations can be enforced via the protocol. The government doesn’t have to chase down every participant to see if they follow the rules. The mere act of agreeing to follow the protocol (in software, remember this ...

Tactics are short-term actions whereas strategy is long-term vision. Surprisingly (to me at least), it turns out that “chess is 99 percent tactics”. Many top chess players admit that you can go a long distance by being very good at tactics alone, i.e., by knowing a lot of patterns.   Computers, even the non-AI variety, are “tactically flawless compared to humans”, writes David Epstein in Range . What happens when man and machine combine forces on a chess board?   While the machine handles tactics, the human can focus on strategy. “It changed the pecking order instantly.” In 1998, when he was still near his peak, Garry Kasparov drew a man-machine match 3-3 with the same opponent whom he had crushed 4-0 in man-only competition… Kasparov, like most top chess players, had been so dominant because he was vastly better at tactics. The difference between him and others when it came to strategy wasn’t much. Shocking.   Once you combine man and machine, it turns ou...

The second design principle behind India’s DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure) is interoperability . As any engineer will tell you, systems rarely talk to each other. Every piece gets optimized for itself, and thus is rarely suited to work with anything else. Plus, companies deliberately choose to keep things in proprietary formats so customers cannot easily switch out.   When we say Aadhar is the world’s first digital ID system, it doesn’t just mean that the ID was created and stored in digital format. It means a lot more than that, as Rahul Matthan explains in The Third Way . It means that it was designed to be usable in all kinds of digital workflows, an example of which we saw in an earlier blog on the design of UPI by unbundling things first.   Another example is Aadhar’s integration with Jeevan Praman, a government pension service. Proof of life can be established remotely by a pensioner, thanks to Aadhar’s interoperability. This is hugely helpful in the rural...