Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The Zerodha article points out that slowly but steadily, Chinese manufacturing moved up the value chain. Patience and strategy matter. Uniquely, the Chinese government identified some sectors as critical (e.g. telecom) and poured money and helped arm-twist Western companies into sharing technological knowhow with Chinese partners. To help domestic companies grow in those sectors, when they were new and inferior initially, China would prevent Western (superior) tech from being sold, thereby creating a “protected home market to develop in”. “This model played out in multiple sectors — solar panels, electric vehicles, high-speed rail equipment. The value chain expanded.” Of course, this can be risky –local companies may stay at low quality only with no fear of competition from superior products. Remember the License Raj? ~~   China adopted a spray-and-pray approach. “They just threw money at everything and hoped something worked… even if the waste along the way was colossal… China go...

There are so many who rave about AI, and its many forms like ChatGPT. Yes, the output of many of these AI’s is very impressive. And yes, they hallucinate too (cook up facts). All that’s well known.   What’s less well known is that many AI’s make mistakes with these two simple questions. The first one: Which is bigger? 9.2 or 9.11? The other one is just as simple: How many r’s does the word “strawberry” have?   Believe it or not, a lot of AI’s get those two questions wrong! What is going on? As you know, the AI’s can (on many topics) explain their reasoning. So they were asked to explain how they come to the wrong answers.   On the 9.2 v/s 9.11 question, the AI’s say there are multiple interpretational patterns to evaluate the question. The maths way is just one of them . The maths way leads to the obvious answer (9.2 is the same as 9.20; and so 9.20 or 9.2 is bigger). But there are other ways to look at the question. One such way is to read them as “2” and “...

Nathan Lent’s book on the “design defects” in the human body, Human Errors , is endlessly fascinating. But why write a book on errors when there are so many “working” things? For one: “By exploring human shortcomings, we can peer into our past. Each and every flaw… tells a story about our species’ evolution.”   He starts with the most famous flaw that lies in our eyes: “The photoreceptor cells of vertebrate retinas appear to be installed backward – the wiring faces the light, while the photoreceptors face inward, away from it.” BTW, it’s not just us – it’s the same for all vertebrates, from fish onwards. But not all species have their eyes wired this way: “Interestingly, the retina of… octopi and squid – is not inverted.” This proves that: “Nature ‘invented’ the camera-like eye at least twice, once in vertebrates and once in cephalopods.”   The problems this arrangement creates for vertebrates are many: Light must travel around the bulk of photoreceptor...

People tend to jump to conclusions. Not just other people, but most of us, as the authors of The Invisible Gorilla explain. There are several reasons for this.   First, it’s got to do with how we are wired: “We perceive patterns where none exist, and we misperceive them when they do exist.” To compound the problem, we are prone to the “illusion of cause”: “(We are) biased to perceive meaning rather than randomness and to infer cause than coincidence.”   A related aspect is that we tend to confuse correlation with causation. In simpler terms, just because two things happen together doesn’t mean one causes the other. The best example of this danger is the ice cream-drowning example: “More people drown on days when a lot of ice cream is consumed, and fewer people tend to drown when only a little ice cream is consumed.” This example, of course, is so obvious that nobody would claim that the consumption of ice cream causes drowning. And it’s obvious to most th...

In general, acts of oppression are done by the majority against the minority. In general, tolerance (if not respect) for other religions is a good idea. In general, the rich exploit the poor. In general, rule by the majority creates the risk of marginalizing the minority. The key point, however, is that these are just rules of thumb, they are not immutable laws of physics. So it makes sense to periodically check if they still hold true. Or, as with anything in the social world, check if something that started off with the best of intentions is now getting exploited by politicians and common man alike. The left leaners must have started with many such rules of thumb which were perfectly valid when they were formulated. Unfortunately, they stopped doing the periodic checks for continuing validity, and instead started treating the rules of thumb as if they were written in stone. At least that’s what I believe has happened. How else can one explain the stance of the left le...