Viswanathan K's Thoughts

China and Italy. Opposite sides to the handling of the Coronavirus. The former appears to be the role-model-if-not-for-this-annoying-thing-called-freedom, while the latter is the origin of the meme “Let’s not be Italy”. Then there’s the UK, writes Santosh Desai. Crudely put, their approach sounds like this: Few people will die. The rest will recover. Just let it play out without any extreme measures. That sounds heartless, so what’s the though process? “The logic employed is that in any case, in will be impossible to prevent this from happening regardless of what actions are taken today. Strict lockdowns might work temporarily but as soon as these are relaxed, the coronavirus is likely to make a strong comeback, the argument goes. Once a majority of the population gets infected and thus becomes immune to the disease, then the virus loses its contagiousness and could get permanently controlled.” Or is the UK approach about sheer pragmatism, writes Tyler Cowen: “For how ...

When someone forms snap judgments of people based on appearance, we know it’s a lot worse than judging a book by its cover. Someone (nick)named Happy on some site made an interesting point on this topic: “Stereotypes are wrong of course. But brands are good.” An interesting question: are stereotypes and brands two sides of the same coin? Happy goes on to say that when people dress a certain way, willy nilly, “they are creating a brand for themselves”: “There's a nerd brand. There's a metro-sexual brand. There's a jock brand, a cheerleader brand, a gothic brand…a gangster brand.” The next step in Happy’s argument is what makes this topic so interesting. When people see someone looking or behaving a certain way, they apply the duck test : “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” Now given that everyone knows this is how most people think, then Happy tells people who (deliberately) project a certain i...