Viswanathan K's Thoughts

We’ve all heard of jokes like this one by Groucho Marx: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know.” Julia Galef wrote this awesome blog on how our mind switches perspectives to “get” the joke: “You can almost hear the gears grinding as we shift from “I, in my pajamas, shot an elephant” to “I shot an elephant who was wearing my pajamas.” Apparently, there’s even a term for cases like this “whose latter half surprises us, forcing us to go back and reconsider the assumptions we’d made about what was going on in the first half”: paraprosdokia. You’re probably thinking only a nutjob analyzes the process behind a joke, right? Hang on because Galef points this is usually how theories change in science, except much more slowly than when you got that joke! “As you collect more observations that don’t seem to fit your theory, you either dismiss them as an anomaly, or find a way to shoehorn them into the framework of your theory, or you...

I love that song with the line, “Everybody wants to rule the world”. In Silicon Valley, the mantra is different, as annunciated in a Huffington Post ad that said: “Don’t just take your place at the top of the world. Change the world.” Changing the world: that’s Silicon Valley’s mantra. Ever since Steve Jobs famously asked the CEO of Pepsi whom he was trying to recruit: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” Some of that confidence/ arrogance is justified. As Heather Havrilesky wrote : “Today the term "information superhighway" no longer feels like hyperbole.” At other times, though, that mantra does seem like hyperbole, as exemplified the time a character in the serial Silicon Valley said: “Because if we can make your audio and video files smaller, we can make your cancer smaller, and hunger smaller, and AIDS.” On the other hand, as Robert Pogue Harrison wrote , hasn’t Silicon Valle...