Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan , wrote this semi-literal, semi-satirical piece titled “The Intellectual Yet Idiot” , IYI for short in the rest of his article (and this blog). So who is an IYI? “(The) class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.” Sound familiar? IYI’s are theoriticians, with no connection in real life to what they like to preach about. Or as Taleb says, they have no skin in the game. The IYI is smug and arrogant: “The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is  his  understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests  and  he knows their interests.” And: “What we generally call participation in the political process, he cal...

"Success is dangerous because often you don’t understand why you succeeded. You almost always know why you’ve failed" -          Marc Pincus, CEO of Zynga I liked the above quote the moment I read it. It took me a while, though, to realize that the statement reflects a philosophy as well. The same philosophy that it’s advocated in The Black Swan by Nicholas Nasim Taleb. If you haven’t read the book, let me state the philosophy. It states that in an environment that has tens (if not hundreds) of variables, it’s often difficult, if not impossible, to identify why exactly someone succeeded. Or failed. It could be just simple luck at times. At others, you pick Reason X for your success when in reality it was Reason Y! Like, most people in IT were lucky: we graduated at the right time (post liberalization and post all the communication investments done by the West in the dot com era). But many IT guys will delude themselves into believing that they...