Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Simulating the world. Or a particular scenario. The ability to do this has enormous evolutionary benefits. To understand why, consider a creature which cannot simulate any aspect, writes Max Bennett in A Brief History of Intelligence . How would it learn anything? By trial and error. Costly in energy and time, let alone the risk angle.   But a creature which can simulate decently or better, well, it learns by “ vicarious trial and error” . Imagining what would happen with a choice rather than actually making that choice. So much more efficient and quicker.   A related aspect is counterfactual learning , i.e., imagining how things would have played out if a different choice had been made. Sadly, in humans at least, this ability has a side-effect we are all familiar with: regret . “We cannot change the past, so why torture ourselves with it?” Because it is an evolutionary habit that made sense for most of human history. For most of our species’ existence: “Such r...

There’s this book, Does My Goldfish Know Who I Am? , on simple answers to great questions kids ask. Neuroscientist Tali Sharot had this answer to an 8-year-old's question about why we don't have memories from the time we were babies and toddlers: “We use our brain for memory. In the first few years of our lives, our brain grows and changes a lot, just like the rest of our body. Scientists think that because the parts of our brain that are important for memory have not fully developed when we are babies, we are unable to store memories in the same way that we do when we are older. Also, when we are very young we do not know how to speak. This makes it difficult to keep events in your mind and remember them later, because we use language to remember what happened in the past.” I tend to both agree and disagree with the first part of the answer. On the one hand, babies learn very fast. How can they do that if they have no way to “store” data and associations? On the ot...

We store almost piece of information on our smartphone. And back that data up on the cloud. But haven’t people been doing that for centuries via stone tablets, books and Post-it notes? To which Sophie McBain responds , there are fundamental differences between the two: “In the past this required deliberate effort, such as sitting down to write a diary, or filing away a letter, or posing for a portrait, today this process can be effortless, even unintentional.” And: “One is a passive receptacle, the other is active. A notebook won’t reorganise the information you give it or ping you an alert; its layout and functions won’t change overnight; its contents aren’t part-owned by the stationery firm that made it.” Another point McBain makes is indeed true: “We’re all tourists exploring the world from behind a camera, too distracted by our digital memories to inhabit our analogue lives fully…Are we less attentive to our experiences because we know that computers will record them ...

On the photo-sharing site Instagram, a ridiculously large number photos posted are of the ones of the food its users are eating! Insane, right? And so everytime the site goes down, the Internet humour has a field day. A few samples: “Instagram is down! Such a shame because I'm hungry but now there's no point in eating until it is back up.” And “Well, there's no point in ordering dessert now.” My 3 year old thinks food is for playing, smearing, splashing, anything but eating…soon she’ll be adding posting it on social media to her list (sigh). Scott Adams found a use of this tendency when he wrote his blog on the “broken” smartphone/iPad interface . But first, what’s his problem exactly? “If you were to design a smartphone interface from scratch, without any legacy issues, would it look like a bunch of app icons sitting on a home screen? No. Because that would be stupid. Would you want your users to be hunting around for the right app every time they want to d...