Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Increasingly, I’ve begun to encounter those awkward moments when the school book says something wrong, the kid detects it and asks if that’s really true. I am stuck between a rock and a hard place. Do I lie, “Yes, the book’s right”? Or do I tell the truth and risk the kid: -           Ask why she needs to learn something that’s wrong? -           Abuse the one instance as grounds to not believe/learn everything else? Take these two recent examples. In the word meanings section, the word “wagged” was defined as “waved from side to side”. “That’s correct for a dog wagging its tail”, my daughter countered, “but if I wave my hand to say bye,   that’s not called wagging my hand, is it?”. Fortunately, that one got resolved easily because she seems to have a feel that English is a crazy language. The other instance involved poetry where the answer to the question as to how a butterfly ...

In Being Wrong , Kathryn Schulz also talks about how we deal with the times we are wrong. But you know that already: denial, excuses etc. Where Schulz makes the topic so interesting is when she points out the reason isn’t (always) ego or malicious agendas. Far more often, we change the question from “Were we wrong?” to “How wrong were we?”. And rarely is the answer that we come up, “Totally”: “Almost no matter what we were wrong about, we can find countless different ways to take the measure of our mistakes.” Put differently, we don’t want to introspect, at least not honestly: “We are not so much honestly trying to size up our errors as frantically trying to downsize them.” Here are the usual ways we go about it: 1)       “Time-frame defense” : I can see the big picture, the long term. You don’t have the patience. Just you wait and see etc. 2)      “Near-miss defense” : But for some silly, minor event, what I said/thought w...

In her awesome book, Being Wrong , Kathryn Schulz writes: “When we make mistakes, we shrug and say we are human. As bats are batty and slugs are sluggish, our own species is synonymous with screwing up.” Sure, you knew that already, and yet: “There is no experience of being wrong. There is an experience of realizing that we are wrong, of course… Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Error: we can be wrong, or we can know it, but we can’t do both at the same time.” Take our beliefs. Not just religious or political beliefs, but nearly every kind of belief we hold: “Our beliefs often seem to us not so much constructed as reflected, as if our minds were simply mirror in which the truth of the world passively appeared.” And that is exactly what leads to, well, errors: “Believing something on the basis of messy, sparse, limited information really is how we err.” Once we have a belief, we then only notice the data that supports it: “Looking for counterevidence...

Why does capitalism produce such economic wonders while communism flops miserably on the same front? Note I just asked about the economic aspects, not the political side of things. I’ll pre-empt the wrongly cited counter-example: China. Sorry, but China is not a communist country in economic terms. Rory Sutherland dismisses efficiency as the critical difference between the two systems. Rather, he says: “Truly free markets trade efficiency for a costly process of market-tested innovation heavily reliant on dumb luck. The reason this inefficient process is necessary is that, though we pretend otherwise, no one knows anything about anything: most of the achievements of consumer capitalism were never planned; they are explicable only in retrospect, if at all.” And in contrast, he says: “The reason to avoid communism is not because it is inefficient, but because it tries to be too intelligent.” Too intelligent? Sutherland elaborates that communism thinks it knows what is ne...

  When I read this line Kathryn Schulz’ book, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error , it sounded both true and arrogant: “As with dying, we recognize erring as something that happens to everyone, without feeling that it is either plausible or desirable that it will happen to us.” She says this belief is perfectly understandable because it affirms “our sense of being smart”. And that is exactly why we hate to be wrong. As Shane Parrish says, “it leaves us feeling idiotic and ashamed”. On the lighter side, I loved these lines by Parrish: “The sentence "I am wrong" describes a logical impossibility. As soon as we know that we are wrong, we aren’t wrong anymore, since to recognize a belief as false is to stop believing it. Thus we can only say "I was wrong." Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Error: we can be wrong, or we can know it, but we can’t do both at the same time.” Failure is a bigger version of being wrong about something....

My dad and I disagree on whether things are ever wrong. Nope, the topic isn’t moral wrongs or nonsensical beliefs based on no justification. Rather the topic was about views or theories built upon available data which later proved to be…well, not correct. To me, such views or theories are wrong. (Just to be clear, I don’t mean the people who came up with those ideas were idiots). My dad disagrees: to him, if the view or theory was based on all available data of the time, then it isn’t right to call it wrong just because you got more data later on. I suspect that my dad believes that my stance is, to quote Issac Asimov: “Everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.” But I don’t believe that all wrongs are “equally wrong”. In fact, I fully agree with Isasac Asimov’s point about the relativity of wrong: “When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you thi...

“Give people the facts and they’ll do the right thing.” -          Bono I remember this Scientific American article stating why traders at investment banks take the crazy risks they take: -          Fact #1: Bonuses depend on profits made : The more risks you take, the more profits you might make which would then translate into a bigger bonus. Ergo, take big risks. -          Fact #2: Bonuses can be insanely high : Bonuses can run into millions. Even one good year can have you set for life; so who cares about the long term? -          Fact #3: Sticking your neck out can be suicidal : If every trader at every other bank takes insane risks and makes money while the going is good, then you would get fired for playing it safe because hey, you bring in less money. How could everybody be wrong? How big an ego do you hav...