Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In his book on why ideas that don’t make any sense yet often work in real life, Alchemy , Rory Sutherland, marketing guru at Ogilvy & Mather, gives away the reason very early: “If you expose every one of the world’s problems to ostensibly logical solutions, those that can easily be solved by logic will rapidly disappear, and all that will be left are the ones that are logic-proof.” Most political and foreign policy problems are “logic-proof”! Half tongue-in-cheek, Sutherland goes on to add: “This isn’t the Middle Ages, which had too many alchemists and not enough scientists. Now it’s the other way around.” He clarifies his book isn’t an assault on “logic or reason”; rather, it is an “attack on a dangerous kind of logical overreach, which demands that every solution should have a convincing rationale”. Statistics is the butt of a lot of jokes, and rightly so. No, not because the field is flawed, but because it is all too easy to draw the wrong conclusions: “Bad maths can l...

Blake Gopnik pointed out that when it comes to art forgeries, most people can “marvel at the forgers’ skill and lament their misdeeds”. Besides, he says: “If a fake is good enough to fool experts, then it’s good enough to give the rest of us pleasure, even insight.” And: “In some ways, they (forgeries) are by him (the famous artist), in the profound sense that they almost perfectly capture his unique contribution to art. If they didn’t, no one would imagine he’d made them.” And isn’t the only difference between a forgery and the standard practice of earlier times that one was authorized by the master and the other wasn’t? “Many wonderful works of art by figures such as Titian, Rembrandt and Rubens were executed partly or even mostly by their studio assistants, which doesn’t make them any less expressive of Titian or Rembrandt’s innovations.” Then Gopnik uses the art-should-be-for-all argument: “Our current market, geared toward the ultra-wealthy, is helping few and hur...

We know about the Google’s and the Facebook’s, companies that went from zero to tens of billions in the blink of an eye. But have you wondered how the venture capitalists, the people who fund such companies when they are starting, decide how to pick them? Which companies to fund, which ones to ignore? Paul Graham from the venture fund, Y Combinator, described the very interesting and, of course, counter-intuitive way of thinking (if it was intuitive, would we be asking the question?) that is needed. Most of us are risk-averse: we dislike losing more than we like winning. So if asked to invest, our first instinct is to ask, “Is it likely to succeed ?” The right question for a venture capitalist, however, is: “Is it likely to succeed really, really big ?” Which is very hard, because as Graham says: “You have to ignore the elephant in front of you, the likelihood they'll succeed, and focus instead on the separate and almost invisibly intangible question of whethe...

Most scientists, especially in the Western world, are atheists or agnostics. The history of the Church obviously contributes to that situation, the poster child for which is Galileo. But far more than that, I think it’s a philosophical clash between the approaches of science and religion that makes scientists pick the former over the latter. As Richard Feynman described it: “How a scientist can take a mystic answer I don’t know because the whole spirit (of science) is to understand.” Feynman elaborated on what would happen when you applied the most basic of scientific principles (to doubt, to question) on religion: “Once you start doubting, just like you’re supposed to doubt, you ask me if the science is true. You say no, we don’t know what’s true, we’re trying to find out and everything is possibly wrong. Start out understanding religion by saying everything is possibly wrong. Let us see. As soon as you do that, you start sliding down an edge which is hard to recover from ...