Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In his book, Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed cites a very interesting problem solving incident at Unilever. The nozzle they were using to make detergents wasn’t working well at all. So they turned to the in-house experts in the fields of maths, fluid dynamics and high pressure systems. They couldn’t fix the problem. When maths-physics expertise couldn’t do the job, Unilever turned to their experts in (hold your breath) biology! The biologists took 10 copies of the nozzle; made random tweaks to each; and tested them. They then took the one that did the best and repeated the process. After 45 “generations”, they had an outstanding nozzle! The pic below shows how the nozzle “evolved”: The biology technique described above is what they call a “genetic algorithm”. Why that name? Nick Bostrom explained why in his book titled Superintelligence : because it mimics natural selection (mutation, inheritance and selection)! So does this mean trying random tweaks is the way to

Naomi Klein says that capitalism cannot be the solution to the problem of climate change: “If we really believed that climate change is an existential crisis, if we believed climate change is a weapon of mass destruction, as John Kerry said, why on Earth would you leave it to the vagaries of the market?” Klein clarifies that she is not saying that “the market has no role”. While agreeing that there will be “solar and wind millionaires”, she says that a solution to climate change requires major changes that can only be achieved via “a strong role for the public sector, a strong role for regulations and, yes, incentives”. Klein’s approach sounds like a (much) stronger version of the approach Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein described in their book, Nudge . Jeremy Waldron describes the book thus:  “Some (choices) make themselves clamorously known; others have to be unearthed…There is no getting away from this: choices are always going to be structured in some manner, wheth

Forming or holding an opinion is easy. Doing the analysis to form that opinion is…well, a lot of work. Which is why most people don’t bother. Ok, you knew that already. After all, who hasn’t gone into a meeting where nobody has read that doc/memo that is going to be discussed? Meetings where people just go along with the flow. Of course, they will come up with that odd statement that makes it look that they did give it some thought. It’s frustrating to go to such meetings: if you don’t prepare, you know it is a waste of time. If you do prepare but others don’t, it is again a waste of time. Damned if you, damned if you don’t. Is there a way out? Perhaps, this Farnam Street blog found the solution : “If you push too far you won’t be at the next meeting because everyone knows you’ll do the work and that means they know that by inviting you they’ll be forced to think about things a little more, to anticipate arguments, etc. In short, inviting you means more work for them.”