Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In his book, Why We Work , Barry Schwartz makes an interesting point about discoveries: “When a scientist, or anyone else, discovers something, it doesn’t occur to us to ask whether that discovery should exist… If someone were to suggest that the Higgs boson shouldn’t exist, we’d wonder what mind-altering substance he’d ingested.” And inventions? “Inventions, in contrast, are a whole other story. Inventions characteristically have moral dimensions. We routinely ask whether they should exist. We wonder what’s good (life improving) about them, and what the drawbacks are. We debate whether their wide distribution should go forward, and if so, with what kind of regulation.” Ok, so there’s nothing new or interesting in what’s said above. Where it gets interesting is in what happens next: “Discoveries tell us things about how the world works. Inventions use those discoveries to create objects or processes that make the world work differently. The discovery of pathogens leads t...

In today’s world, privacy is a buzzword. Most curse Facebook for its impossibly difficult privacy settings (as if that wasn’t bad enough, they change the rules frequently). Then there are the government agencies world over that like to snoop on their enemies and more and more now, even their own citizens. (In case of dictatorships, citizens are the enemies!) So if privacy is such a good thing worth protecting, why is it, asks Scott Adams : “We tend to fear losing our privacy until it's gone. Then we wonder what all the fuss was about.” Adams cites instances where we benefit by giving up our privacy: online dating services (matrimonial sites in India), (even) more relevant search results on Google, deals from shops or sites you frequent, or even (shudder) the joy of having your friends “like” your posts on Facebook! Of course, what many protest is corporate surveillance: Google, Facebook and Twitter lead the pack. Adams anticipates the protest against government survei...

Rob Horning pointed out how Twitter has changed the way he reads and analyzes articles on the Net, or rather how he doesn’t do those things anymore: “Now, when I hit upon an article that starts me thinking, I excerpt a sentence of it on Twitter and start firing off aphoristic tweets….At worst, tweeting pre-empts my doing any further thinking, since I am satisfied with merely charting the response.” Next look at Jennifer Guevin’s complaint about how “snap judgments at warp speed are ruining the Internet” . She cites the following example: “A dude at a tech conference tweets a picture of a woman's feet in stilettos, and judges her to be brainless based on the fact that she is wearing said footwear. Predictably, outrage ensues.” Neither side of the “rage war” that followed on Twitter, Guevin says, stops to factor in that nobody can really convey their point, let alone subtleties, in 140 characters. Is it not possible, asks Guevin, that the guy who tweeted was an: “equal...