Notes from the Underground

Phir Mile Sur Mera Tumhara

2010-01-28T12:58:00.004+05:30

Everybody is cribbing big time about Phir Mile Sur Mera Tumhara (Part 1, Part 2) - snarkmax but funny putdown here.

Let me stick my neck out and say that I liked the video.

First, let me get the obvious out of the way: Bollywood definitely
used this to feed their ego - SRK, Aamir, Salman, Deepika in skimpy
dress, Ash and Abhi, Sonu Nigam (!), Shahid, Ranbir, Amitabh - don't
need *so* many of those in there, with their own segments that too.
And excluding Sachin, Dravid & co. from the video? That pisses me off too.

But you can see how the video tries to clearly make the point that we
have a new and different India from the one 25 years ago. India is
nowhere exoticised (the original Mile Sur did exoticise India a wee
bit), and in general we see a much richer, cleaner, posher looking
India. Even with the much abused Shiamak Davar - Shobhana
Bharatanatyam segment; I can clearly see how they're trying to make the
point the new India is not
competing but is coexisting and is sort of paying homage to the
traditional India (although the execution was poor, because Davar sucked big
time and Shobhana was all awesomeness). And then there's the new, urban, hip India - being represented by the
Shahid Kapoor segment, as well as the funky instrumental segments
- Rahman, Sivamani, another couple of guys with shades I don't know in
the 2nd part.

There was also criticism
that by showing mostly the children of stars - Anoushka, Abhishek,
Deepika, Amjad Khan's sons - etc. were they suggesting that only the
people of the already successful can make it big in India? I think the point
was to show generational change, passing of the baton etc., and
showing parents and children together is the most universal way of
showing that.

I definitely loved that the various regional language segments are now
longer, and the segments of Telugu, Tamil did sound nice to my ears (the
lyrics of the Telugu segment have changed, and are quite good). And
although Salman did his best to ruin the segment with the deaf/mute
kids, I still found that scene quite touching.

And the video having its cheesy bits is, on the whole, not that bad. Indian
movies are hajaar cheesy anyway, so SRK, Aamir and Salman doing their
respective stereotypical acts is kinda appropriate, no?

Why I don't dig libertarianism that much any more

2009-09-08T02:46:00.005+05:30

Over the last 3 years, the strength of my belief in libertarianism has waned. I still am libertarian enough to have Hayekian moments every time I go to the grocery store, and I shed an internal tear of joy every time Bryan Caplan writes another blog post arguing for immigration reform. But still. I've found myself disagreeing more often with people and writers I once admired; I've given up reading Reason.com and Cafe Hayek and Amit Varma for the most part. This doesn't at all imply that I am fan of govt. regulation all of a sudden; that is a separate issue.

Here are bunch of reasons why this may have happened, in roughly increasing order of importance, I think.

1. Signaling (the cynic's explanation): As I come across more and more libertarians, may be the philosophy doesn't seem as exclusive as it did before, and I consequently derive less signaling benefit from holding such beliefs. In short, libertarianism is no longer cool.

2. Simple indifference to politics: I am less interested in politics and self-righteous debates than before; politics is the mind-killer.

3. Research funding: Given that for the last 3 years, I've been supported as a grad student by the U.S. govt., a principled stand against govt. spending is a bit hypocritical, no? In general, research on today's scale simply needs govt. funding; and while the many inefficiencies of current academia is a topic I'd love to talk about, I'll spare you for now 'cause that's a separate topic.

4. Foxes vs. hedgehogs: Philip Tetlock studied for 20 years the predictive accuracy of political experts and wrote a widely acclaimed book about it. Basically he found that experts who were skeptical of grand theories and used "local", ad-hoc models ("foxes") were generally more accurate forecasters than experts with overarching grand theories to explain all developments ("hedgehogs"). Now this doesn't carry over cleanly to policy debates, but it does suggest that attachment to simple, elegant theories in social science is not such a great idea. Among the major political ideologies libertarianism is probably the simplest and most elegant one, and all of a sudden this doesn't seem like praise. (May be this explains why engineers and geeks, with their training in math, are overrepresented amongst libertarians.)

5. Corporate social responsibility: I no longer accept the Friedmanite view of corporate social responsibility - that a company can do whatever it takes to maximise profit so long as it obeys the law. It was right and proper that De Beers be pressured to stop putting "blood diamonds" out on the global market, even though the company may not have technically been breaking any law. In general, companies will cut corners, lie, and indulge in all sorts of manipulative behaviour that even 6 year olds know are wrong. Turning a blind eye to all of this just because it's technically legal seems quite callous to me.

6. Defer to the experts: Frankly, no matter how intuitively appealing free market economics ("Econ 101") may feel, I should shut up, realize there's economics beyond Econ 101, and simply believe in whatever the average expert on any given topic believes. E.g. when Ron Paul comes along arguing for the gold standard - I don't even need to know the technical arguments as to why this is loony; all I need to know is that practically no reasonable economist thinks this is a good idea. This strategy is very sound as far as it goes, except that there are topics where it is non-trivial to figure out what the average expert believes in, and there are topics which are a combination of ethics and empirical knowledge (corporate social responsibility, the role of the govt. in protecting the environment, abortion etc.) and therefore there are no clear experts to defer to.

7. The recent financial crisis: Beware those who are not surprised by surprising seeming data; the scale of madness displayed by Wall Street in the subprime crisis can fail to surprise only if you are a investment banker yourself or you've made a thorough study of human irrationality. (Judge Posner surely deserves some credit for having the guts to revise his life-long beliefs, although I haven't read the book.) The main surprise is not even that investment bankers were greedy, but that they were *flat-out stupid*. Having their own careers, financial security and reputation at stake was not enough incentive for these people to act rationally. *That* is what scares me; greed is widely reviled, but greed has predictable consequences, one can turn greed around to society's advantage (which is how markets work when they do). On the other hand it is stupidity that has unpredictable consequences; there is no saying how things might turn out when you deal with mad men. The only philosophy that's survived this whole mess is Nicholas Taleb's, and his theories have nothing at all to do with libertarianism.

So there you go. Today's piece of tangentially related advice: it's a good strategy usually to hold off on proposing solutions until you have understood the problem at hand properly.

Motion koan

2008-12-29T22:15:00.002+05:30

The world is still
Motion is in the mind
If you don't believe me
Ask Julian Barbour

Why Apocalypto is awesome

2008-12-20T11:02:00.009+05:30

I just finished watching Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, one of my all time favourites, for the second time. The movie is set in a Mayan village of hunter gatherers in the 16th century. The jungle that surrounds the village forms a beautiful backdrop to the movie throughout, and it is almost as if the jungle were a character itself. The dialogue is entirely in Yucatec Mayan, and adds to the authenticity (this tough choice not to have the characters speak English shouldn't come as a surprise, once you realize that it was a Mel Gibson movie - his earlier Passion of the Christ after all, was also entirely in Semitic languages. For all of Mel Gibson's wackiness, you still gotta hand it to the guy for being an awesome, tenacious filmmaker.) In other words, the movie is a period piece. But it's also a superb action movie, with almost the entire second half of the movie consisting of an adrenaline-pumping extended chase scene. Except for some cliches - like the little girl who foretells the future in portentous tones, and the important
plot element that is lifted almost verbatim from a Tintin story - the plot twists and turns realistically. And although I would have prefered the visuals and background score to have been a bit subtler, they on the whole definitely add to the movie's experience.

But wait, this is not all there is to this movie. Apocalytpo also beautifully illustrates a couple of ideas that my other topic of this post - Jared Diamond's first book The Third Chimpanzee - makes quite emphatically. And those ideas are:

1. Genocide is a human universal: As kids, we learn how our rise to modernity has been scarred by various horrors - the genocides committed by the Nazis, the British imperalists, Stalin etc. are learned from early on enough that they are now cliches. However, there is always this seeming impulse to set these incidents out as somehow being aberrations; as being worthy of remembrance because of their perceived extreme deviance from the norm in the history of our species. At the very least, the idea that genocide has been a universal feature of humans through time and space, is something that is never said in our history books, and it is something I attained a dim realization of only after watching this movie, and a better understanding was to come only after reading The Third Chimpanzee. Humans throughout the ages, be they hunter-gatherers or European colonizers, have been unhesitant to methodically kill humans en masse if it suits their purpose, and they didn't need special evil in their hearts to do that. There was no golden age of innocence for humanity when genocide was not common. Now, this point may either seem melodramatic or obvious to you, but this movie brought it home to me for the first time.

2. How hunter-gatherers were gradually vanquished, and how that has been bad for humanity: One of the revelations when I was reading The Third Chimpanzee was that farming was not, as is commonly presumed, an unambiguously progressive step for humanity. Jared Diamond, in an essay for the Discover magazine that would eventually be incorporated into the book, calls the turn from hunting gathering to agriculture "the worst mistake in the history of the human race". Why so? For starters, the groups of humans who retained their hunting-gathering ways were in fact much healthier than those groups that opted for agriculture:

Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunter-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5'9" for men, 5'5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B.C. had reached a low of 5'3" for men ,5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors. (link)

The reason was that turning to agriculture deprived our diet of the diversity that hunting-gathering provided it with, and turned it into a diet excessively dependent on a few carbohydrate-rich cereals. Besides, diseases was rife in the dense populations that became possible only with the advent of farming.

But this was not the only, or even the main cost of turning to agriculture. That was to be the creation of gross social inequalities :

Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources like orchards or herds of cows. Instead, they live off the wild plants and animals that they obtain each day. Everybody except for infants, the sick, and the old join in the search for food. Thus there can be no kings, no full-time professionals, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others.

Only in a farming population could contrasts between the disease-ridden masses and a healthy, non-producing elite develop. (from the book, no online link)

This is not to say that there would have been no conception of social status at all among hunter-gatherers. For sure, the more skilled hunters in a hunter-gatherer group would have got more respect, but the scale of inequality would have been nowhere near that between a pharoah and a Jewish slave in ancient Egypt - to take an example from a society made possible only by agriculture.

And Apocalypto illustrates this idea beautifully - the contrast between the egalitarianism and the health of the hunter-gatherers, versus the emaciation and social inequality of the kingdom (a kingdom that could only have been built on the basis of agriculture) they are abducted to, couldn't be greater.

So why did humans turn to agriculture at all?

One answer boils down to the adage "Might makes right." Farming could support
many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter gatherers are rarely over one person per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 time that.) [..]

As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages,
bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward
agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. (link)

And so the process has continued, so that we now live in a world with hardly any communities that practise hunting gathering.

***

Anyway, so that was a long post. If you have not seen Apocalypto yet, I fear I may have filled your mind with interpretations that you may well not see in the movie. And I shall return to post about The Third Chimpanzee again - it's a really fascinating, fundae-packed book.

Explaining the enthu of first-year college students

2008-12-12T00:38:00.006+05:30

(Enthu is slang for enthusiasm.)

It is customary for graduating (final year) students in my undergrad college to make an "year video" or a "batch video" - something that was meant to capture various aspects of the graduating batch's 4 years in college. In the batch video of one of the batches senior to us, I remember there was a joke on the naivete of students in their first year. The scene shows a first year guy with his shirt tucked in, hair neatly combed, wearing shoes and carrying a bag (ostensibly full of books) leaving from his hostel room after the day's classes were over. His room-mate asks him where he is going, and our hero replies, in all sincerity: "Library yaar, sessional pandrah din main hai!" (Library dude, the midterms are in fifteen days!). The scene would provoke much laughter among the gathered 3rd years or final years watching this video, not only because to study for a midterm from 15 days before is ridiculous, but also because they realise that many of them were in fact like that back in the first year.

Anyway, the point of this story was to illustrate the fact that in Engineering colleges, first year students have way more enthu than more senior students. For me, and for many of my friends (studying in colleges other than mine as well), plotting the aggregates across the 8 semesters showed a nice monotonically decreasing function. My first semester aggregate was in the mid 80's I think, and by my last semester it was in the late 60s. Heh. First years are also the major takers of most of the "general aptis" and "C aptis" (apti is short for aptitude test) and various mutants of these two general forms that were informally organized in our college.

So why are first year college students so much more hard working? (Throughout this post, I'll be talking about the average student. There'll always be exceptions - people who retain their enthu through all 4 years or people whose enthu actually increases over time.) Or to put it another way, why does enthu drop so much with years in college? The straightforward explanations are that first year students are "naive"; that people get jaded with time in college; that people get sidetracked with other obsessions (gaming, movies, drinking etc.). W.r.t the last explanation - I think it's likely the students get sidetracked only because they have already decided that studies aren't worth their time and are looking for other things to pursue.The explanation that students become jaded with time is also a bit circular - it is just another way of saying that they lose enthu, which is the phenomenon we are trying to explain here. Another explanation that someone from my college might come up with is that seniors restrict the lives of first year students as a part of ragging - preventing them from going out of campus, drinking etc. But this fails to explain why the pattern of declining enthu holds even in colleges without much ragging or even a hostel.

As you might have guessed by now, I have a different explanation, but I have to digress a bit first to introduce it.

It is well known that when a brood of chickens is first assembled, they fight for the first few days until a status hierarchy or "pecking order" gets established. This is the pattern not just in chickens, but other animals including monkeys as well. Researchers who want to artificially induce stress in a group of monkeys (in order to see what effect stress has on their health, say) introduce a new monkey into the group every now and then, so that there will be renewed fighting to figure out where the newcomer fits into the hierarchy. The point of the status hierarchy is actually to prevent future conflicts - once hen B knows that it is weaker than hen A it won't mess with hen A anymore and both A and B will save themselves the costs of fighting in the future.

I think something slightly similar may be happening when students first enter engineering colleges - the main difference being that the considerations according to which humans accord status are subtle and culture/peer-group dependent. When students first enter college, they don't know the abilities and skill levels of the others - they don't know who among them is the smartest, who is good at speaking English, who is good at sports, who is witty etc etc. This is an unstable situation - people want to know what their status in various spheres so that they can save energy by not taking part in status games where they are likely to lose. But this situation also provides a great opportunity for first year students - may be you are better than most others in your batch at something or the other! Students who get admitted into elite colleges will be particularly susceptible to overestimating their chance at being better than their new batchmates - for these students would have been at the top of their respective heaps before joining the college. Hence the "naive" enthu of batch after batch of first year students - besides studying hard for their coursework, they take part in aptis, quizzes and any other crazy-ass competition evil clubs invent to make money.

This also explains why students lose enthu over time. Once it is relatively clear who are the winners in the various status games, others know better than to waste their time competing. If you've determined that you are only mediocre in your class (even if you were a topper before coming to college), there is no longer much point to studying hard (even though what you are studying now - in your third year - is actually much more important to your job prospects as well as your general competence as an engineer). You might as well save yourself the energy.

There are probably other factors - such as social proof (which basically says people will do things that they see others doing,) - that amplify this phenomenon. And there's always noise that may either amplify or weaken the phenomenon for short periods - e.g., the enthu among students in the month before recruitment season (when everyone is busy mugging English word lists and C programming fundae) is way higher than what the long-term trend alone would predict.

Review of "Slumdog Millionaire" (Short version: It rocks!)

2008-12-05T10:34:00.004+05:30

I wasn't too sure of how Slumdog Millionaire would turn out. It got rave reviews, won awards, but the premise of the movie seemed a little cheesy to me. But then again, it was a movie by Danny Boyle - the same Danny Boyle who made Trainspotting, the genre-bending classic of the 90s. But then again, the movie is wholly set in Bombay, and who knows if Danny Boyle won't make a few blunders in his portrayal of India? I was looking forward to seeing the movie, but I was also preparing myself for a letdown.

I needn't have feared. "Slumdog Millionaire" is a zesty, fast-paced movie with some brilliant acting, especially by Dev Patel, who plays the protagonist Jamal Malik. (I won't summarize the plot here, go to IMDB for that.) The writing always has a light, humorous touch - as kids Jamal and his brother Salim go through some very grim (the word Dickensian comes to mind) experiences, but there is never a portentous air to the narration. Nor is there ever a hint of a cliche, despite the fact that there are enough common elements in the story from previous Bollywood movies. Jamal and Salim feel like real kids to you, with their ability to produce an unexpected kind of humour at unexpected times. By the time Jamal and Salim grow up, you as audience have bought into the characters enough that it doesn't matter that the plot from then on is simply concerned with (the time-honoured) aim of bringing Jamal and the love of his life together.

The movie has definite parallels to Trainspotting in that the narration does not give too many hints to the tragic elements in the story, what with the spontaneous humour and outward cheeriness and fast background scores. (Oh, and A. R. Rahman composed the music btw.) I do wish the whole of the movie was in Hindi though - the characters converse in Hindi as kids, but speak in English with suspiciously good accents once they are around 12. Except for this bit, there is little to complain in the movie on the ever-prickly topic of authenticity (the credits mysteriously list Loveleen Tandan as "co-director (India)", so I am sure that helped).

On the whole, the movie has lived up to the hype. Watch it if you can.

Slang as signaling

2008-11-26T22:29:00.003+05:30

(This post was originally a comment on a blogpost explaining the usage 'jai'. Yuppies and college students in India have an extensive collection of slang - 'pseud', 'put', 'level', 'light', 'set' etc. etc. See Aadisht's blog for more examples in natural usage.)

Not to be an asshole, but the constant invention and ostentatious usage of slang by a lot of yuppie Indians strikes me as a signaling mechanism. Its point seems to be to advertise membership of a select (or at least self-perceived select) group. The corollary is that once there is widespread adoption of a particular slang, people feel the need to invent new slang to differentiate themselves once again from the uncool masses.

Linguistically or communication-wise, there is little point to the slang. I do not claim that it makes the speakers more stupid (I am not that kind of a language maven), but there are simpler, more unambiguous, and probably more elegant ways to communicate than to use such slang. This gives me all the more reason to suspect that slang usage is signaling - the costlier a signal, the more credible it is (think peacock’s tail or a deer’s stotting). Slang usage is made costly by overloading the meaning of the slang, making the usage itself grammatically unconventional, and by making the meanings counterintuitive.

Btw, I am not dissing or criticising slang usage by saying all this. Signaling explains a lot of human behaviour, and this just seems to me to be another instance of it.

Book review: Thomas Sowell's "Race and Culture"

2008-11-22T04:35:00.004+05:30

Thomas Sowell's "Race and Culture" is a mostly compelling and occasionally irritating defense of the anti-cultural-relativist thesis: "The differences between cultures are not inconsequential - on the contrary, they are important for understanding why some groups are rich and some are poor, and some are developed while others are not." In support of his thesis, Sowell frequently cites various examples of ethnic immigrant groups who arrive in a foreign country with little money, but accumulate significant wealth in a few generations. Examples abound: the Gujaratis in East Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, Chinese in Malaysia, Germans in Brazil, and of course, the Jews in various parts of the world at various points in history. Other sociologists, and the natives in such cases themselves, often see such groups as "mere middlemen" who get rich by bleeding the rest of the society around them. (A recent tragic consequence of such attitudes being the expulsion of thousands of South Asian families from Idi Amin's Uganda.) Sowell forcefully argues for the contrary: such immigrant groups often create real value in the native economies, and furthermore, they are able to do so because their cultures are advantageous in certain respects - e.g. they encourage hard work, thrift, a willingness to forego current consumption for future gains and so on.

While Sowell clearly acknowledges the superiority of certain cultures over others (to the extent that they lead to better lives for the people following them), he is also keen to use the historical record to show that cultural superiority is often temporary, and in no way implies racial superiority. Whereas Britishers in the 18th and the 19th centuries gave birth to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, they were considered too ill-disciplined and barbarian to be worthy as slaves during Roman times. While much of Christian Europe was foundering through the Middle Ages, Muslims in the Middle East had a much more progressive, knowledge-seeking culture.

Besides this, the book covers other interesting aspects - how race and ethnicity play out in politics; the relation between race and intelligence - a part I mostly skimmed over because I had had enough of the IQ controversies. A particularly interesting chapter on slavery shows how European cultures are not the only ones guilty of slavery, and that slavery has been a universal phenomenon throughout history. The norm in history until the 19th century has been that the races which happen to be strong at any given point enslave those that are weak and conveniently close by. (The only exception, perhaps, is India - although we Indians made up for it by outcasting a quarter of the population as untouchables.) Although societies differed (in space and time) in how they treated slaves, slavery as a practice itself was considered perfectly normal. The *real* surprising thing is how civilized opinion in Western Europe changed from pro-slavery to anti-slavery in the matter of a few decades. Whereas Britain was the biggest slave-trader in the 18th century, by the 19th century popular opinion had turned so much that they were actively using their imperial and military might to *stop* the slave trade.

The irritating thing about Sowell is that he frequently attacks the sociologists who have defended the wrong theories for reasons of political correctness. While such sociologists may deserve criticism, these attacks also quickly grow repetitive and tiring. Give me the substance and spare me the drama, is what I say.

Book review: Robert Wright's "The Moral Animal"

2008-11-22T04:32:00.003+05:30

Beginning in the 1960's with the work of George Williams, there has been a revolution within evolutionary biology with the development of theories that employ what can be intuitively understood as the "selfish gene" or the "gene's-eye" view. If Richard Dawkins' 1976 best seller "Selfish gene" was a wonderful introduction to the public at large of this revolution, then "The Moral Animal" is a worthy sequel where the full implications of applying the gene's eye view to human evolution are hammered out. Many aspects of human behaviour - how we select our mates, how men and women are promiscuous in their different ways, the love-hate relationship between siblings in a family, the importance we (men in particular) attach to social status, self-deception, altruistic behaviour - can only be understood by keeping in mind that our behaviours are the product of natural selection, and in particular by employing the gene's eye view of natural selection. Robert Wright has a lucid, albeit simplifying, writing style, and he uses a clever strategy to keep readers' interest from flagging - for each significant idea or theory he introduces, he illustrates it in the next chapter using incidents from Charles Darwin's life. (Is there a more apt subject for a case study in evolutionary psychology?)

Robert Wright's content and approach are on the whole, I think, different from later popularizers of evolutionary psychology such as, say, Steven Pinker. Whereas for Pinker (and John Tooby and Leda Cosmides before him), attacking the "blank slate" concept of human mind is all important in every discussion of evolutionary psychology, this issue hardly surfaces in "The Moral Animal". Personally, I was quite sick of reading about this topic, so its absence was a welcome relief.

Zolf Bar Baad (Tresses in the wind)

2007-09-04T17:46:00.000+05:30

Sometimes gems turn up in the unlikeliest of places, like this Persian song, blogged about by Language Log. (Do click that link for some charming stories behind that song.)

Here's the English translation. Here's a superb essay on the difficulties of translating from Persian to English.

On the morality of non-vegetarianism

2007-08-24T06:19:00.000+05:30

The subject of animal rights has come up again, but I don't even have a definitive opinion on animal rights (let alone the definitive argument), so I'll talk about a slightly different issue - killing animals for meat. I am quite against the killing of animals for meat (or for any other reason other than self-survival, basically), and especially factory farming. I am against it, but not enough to say that the govt. should step in and outlaw factory farming (partly because I am a libertarian, the type who sees unintended consequences everywhere).

However, non-vegans can soon be spared the nagging moral doubt that they are doing something horrible everytime they're eating meat. The solution is cloning of animal meat tissue using stem cells. Here's Ray Kurzweil, a visionary if there ever existed one, on the benefits of stem cell cloning:

Another exciting opportunity is to create meat without animals. As with therapeutic cloning, we would not be creating the entire animal, but rather directly producing the desired animal parts or flesh. Essentially, all of the meat--billions of pounds of it--would in essence be from a single animal. What's the point of doing this? For one thing, we could eliminate human hunger. By creating meat in this way, it becomes subject to the "law of accelerating returns," which is the exponential improvements in price-performance of information-based technologies over time. So meat produced in this way will ultimately be extremely inexpensive. It could cost less than one percent of conventionally produced meat. Even though hunger in the world today is certainly exacerbated by political issues and conflicts, meat will become so inexpensive that it will have a profound effect on the affordability of food. [link]

Disregard all the hyperbole about "the law of accelerating returns" and solving human hunger in one fell swoop. The basic point is that using stem cell cloning can be used to produce meat much more efficiently than it is today, and besides it will solve the problem of animal flatulence contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. Once meat can be produced this way, factory farming will stop and people will accept much more easily that killing animals for food or pleasure is just plain wrong.

To me, this is a classic example of how technology can make moral progress (in addition to material progress i.e.) possible where all the preaching in the world wouldn't get you there.

A vision to kick Google's ass

2007-08-23T22:24:00.000+05:30

Do take a look at the keynote talk by Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference. He talks about how he intends to "democratise" web search, so that one can create web search engines as easily as one can set up web servers today using the LAMP stack. He's an awesome speaker, with a fluency that clearly tells you he's spent a lot of time researching and thinking about what he's saying. One big problem I see with private players being the only big guys in search is that research gets hampered because of lack of access to the kind of data that Google or Microsoft have. If crawls of the web become open source, and so do user clickthrough logs (after suitable privacy preserving transformations), I would expect grad students and research teams to hugely benefit from such data. Good news for me!

I heart Jimmy Wales larger philosophy - I think there are rich enough parts of the world that can afford to provide public goods that can benefit everyone, including themselves. I have been thinking for a while now that the quality of a society is nothing but the quality of its public goods - these things are too important to be left to the governments alone to produce.

And while you're at it, you may also want to check out Steve Yegge's super funny talk on branding

2007-03-23T11:11:00.000+05:30

I was checking out the McCullough effect when it struck me that my (alleged) red-green confusion could be making the experience different for me. Many of my friends are sure I am colorblind, given my general hesitation in refering to objects using their colours, but so far I've been rationalising it away as the fault of my kindergarten teachers who never taught me which colour was which. (Heh.) Then I decided to test myself and indeed I turned out to be color-blind - I saw exactly what the test said the red-green colourblind would see. Now, I am sure you know this, but just in case you don't, the typical red-green colorblind person *can* see colours other than black and white - it's just that they have trouble distinguishing some hues of red and green. Although I think I have trouble conjuring up vivid and colourful imagery in my mind's eye - but that's probably an entirely different issue.

Next time you are making a presentation that involves distinguishing colours (like a histogram or a pie-chart or some other sort of graph), think of the red-green colorblind too. (And what if some are blind? Don't ask me.) You should care because around 7-10% of males are colourblind.

And if you are colorblind too, drop a comment and make me feel better.

300

2007-03-12T03:46:00.000+05:30

So I finally watched it the night before last. Don't read all those pompous reviews which seek to cast the film as racist and almost neo-Nazi for various reasons. Forget the political message the movie conveys unintentionally - watch it for the style, the gorgeous cinematography, the sepia tones and revel in atavistic tribalism at the Spartans' triumphs. What kind of fool would take this kind of movie for a moral/historical/political lesson and decide that eugenics is good (the Spartans kill all unhealthy babies) or that Persia stands for tyranny and mysticism and so on? One can read such messages even from Tolkein's ~~garbage~~ verbiage (the white elves represent all that is Good and the disfigured, black Orcs represent Evil). Just take a break and enjoy 300 for all the visual artistry, the testosterone-pumping background score and the great narrative.

Some wisdom on paternalism

2007-03-03T09:10:00.000+05:30

Paternalism is the idea that the government should restrict citizens' freedom for their own good. Examples abound - prohibitions on alcohol/smoking/drugs, prohibitions on risky financial investments etc. Paternalism leads to a special case of government regulation - the kind which is intended to benefit the individual, rather than "society" or nation (examples of the second kind are restrictions on free trade, and other innumerable economic regulations).

Robin Hanson, over at the Overcoming Bias blog, says that paternalism is about bias:

... bias claims seem to be central to paternalism; regulators and citizens each think the others are biased.
To evaluate if paternalism is good or bad, we need more than the sort of evidence that would convince regulators that they are less biased than citizens, or that would convince citizens that they are less biased than regulators. After all, we expect each group to be biased in underestimating their own bias.

Without such evidence, paternalism is just arrogance, i.e., an unsupported presumption by regulators of their own superiority.

It's good to see him highlight the bias of regulators, but it's an argument that has been made before by libertarians, albeit in stronger language.

Eliezer Yudkowsky (who's the author of the highly recommended article - Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks (pdf)) makes some excellent observations in a comment on the post. They say a fool and his money are soon parted - regulation is an uphill battle against this. Regulation happens because society is unwilling to accept that they can't altruistically restrict the choices of fools without doing greater harm to the rest of the society (and even to the the fools, the intended benefit group itself).

The brutal tradeoff: You can open stores for banned products, but people whose sole fault was to be born stupid will shop there and get hurt. There would be social benefits too, like the ability to use important medications that the FDA will take another five years to approve. These benefits will accrue to more people than just the cognitively advantaged. But there are stupid people and they will get hurt and they don't necessarily deserve it. This is what people can't face - they don't wish to think of themselves as uncompassionate - and this is why society tries to impose regulations regardless of the cost-benefit tradeoff.

I don't think all regulation is bad, nor that we should see all regulation through the same lens - i.e., for example, one can't just use the same arguments against alcohol prohibition and against drug prohibition - the usage patterns of drugs and alcohol, have been historically different and are different now also, there is different levels of societal acceptance to alcohol and drug consumption, and they have different effects on the mind and body. I wouldn't be convinced by arguments that treat one as analagous to the other - what I would be convinced by are cost-benefit calculations showing that both prohbitions are damaging to the population at large.

But that's me. What Eliezer is saying is that utilitarian arguments just won't cut it with the rest of the society. Most people wouldn't care to understand the ultimate effects of regulation - they would rather comfort themselves with the thought that they have done *something* to help people.

2007-01-22T11:32:00.000+05:30

The latest issue of the Economist is about globalisation and inequality. The leader article talks about the various options and difficulties in addressing the inequalities due to globalisation without killing the golden goose that is free trade. There's also an article on cotton farmers' suicides in India - the Economist thinks the ultimate problem is the absence of an active enough labour market for farmers to move from farming to other sectors. And then there's a survey - much of which unfortunately, is behind the subscription wall - about why CEOs' pays have been raising so drastically in the last decade, . But you can read the overview article atleast. Excellent stuff, on the whole.

Snow, at last!

2007-01-22T09:43:00.000+05:30

Random hodge-podge post

2007-01-17T10:41:00.000+05:30

Apparently, people are dying for me to resume blogging again. The thing is that I am inundated with quality material to read in my spare time.

First, brief reviews of the books I have been reading:
-> No Two Alike: This is Judith Harris' second book, after her widely successful and controversial The Nurture Assumption, where she argued that parents have zero long-term effect on the personality of their kids, once you control for the genes that they share. (Here's a Malcolm Gladwell article on the book that I haven't read. I recommend this Edge interview for a justification of her seemingly extreme views.) In this book, she picks up from where she left off in her previous book - most components of personality have a heritability of 0.45 - what explains the remaining 55% of the variance in personality? She frames this as some sort of mystery (which I found rather tedious) for which she eliminates the mainstream explanations one after the other. She builds her final hypothesis using the tools of Evolutionary Psychology, and the end result is too complicated for me to explain here. (Go read the review on gnxp, if you want the details.) I find her hypothesis reasonably plausible, but I am reading another book that is a critique of Evolutionary Psychology, so I might rethink my opinions soon.

-> Saving capitalism from the capitalists: Still reading. The point of the book is to first convince the reader of the net benefits of well-developed financial markets, and then try to understand the actual circumstances under which financial markets are likely to develop, which can be useful for framing public policy. The main case study here is the U.S. economy , which has seen an explosion in the kinds of things that are done on financial markets in the last 30 years. In this time, mutual funds, hedge funds and a whole ecosystem of financial derivatives have been born , and credit, broadly defined, has become vastly easier to obtain. The result has been an increase in the number of enterpreneurs and the rate of innovation (most visible, ofcourse in IT), more competitive markets, bigger markets for skills, resulting in more choice for the someone to choose who they want to work for. The approximate causal chain for how this happened is this - a surge in academic research about financial markets and how one can make more money out of them (making them more efficient), which led to removal of regulations that until then prevented people (and businesses) from making "risky investments" and other regulations that were unfavourable to institutional investors , which led to greater institutional ownership of stocks, which meant that resources are used more carefully, because institutional investors have enough incentive and clout to ensure that companies do not waste their money for frivolous reasons. Obviously I am skipping out on a whole lot of other reasons they go on and on about.

The second part of the book is where they conjecture about under what circumstances markets (in general) emerge, and the part I am currently reading. Specifically, the question is - when do governments enforce property rights and tax their citizens, instead of arbitrarily stealing from them? There is a killer chapter where they examine England from the time of Henry the VII to the time of Elizabeth I and trace how the arbitrary power of the monarchy declined and enforcement of property rights improved. It is, along with David Friedman's essay, the best stuff I have read on property rights. I promise to return to this at greater length.

Time for online stuff now:
-> My favourite new blog: Overcoming Bias
There was a wonderful post sometime back there, titled The cognitive architecture of bias

Research from psychology and neuroscience shows that your brain has organizational characteristics similar to this caricature of the Bush Administration. There are systems that are responsible for powerful, simple emotional reactions that serve to focus other systems to give fine-tuned attention to your brain's priorities and preferred outcomes. Most of the detailed systems don't care much about why they have the jobs they are given; they just do the work of carrying them out in a highly distributed, bureaucratic way. And you -- the conscious, chatty you -- are that dimwitted patsy, the misinformed press agent. The conscious you is not the President and you're certainly not Karl Rove. You are the Scott McClellan for your bureaucratic brain. You're constantly being duped into believing public-friendly stories about yourself, because your entire job is to tell stories handed to you by ruthless, clever, unconscious communications systems. You're not the whole head; you're just the talking head.
You can't even trust your own introspection, because your press agent simply doesn't have direct access to the Oval Office. The best you can do, even with your own behavior, is to try to piece together hypotheses about the hidden motives at work based on what the person actually does, situated in the context of things you know are generally true of why people might want to do those things.

I have not quoted the first parts of the analogy - go read the whole post.

To get a good understanding of what these people mean when they say biases and why understanding and overcoming biases is important, you really should read - "Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks." (That's a Google cache - the site that hosted this pdf, the Singularity Institute, has mysteriously disappeared - which is a pity, because it had some great content.) Update: The site is up. You can access the pdf here.

-> Drifting to cognitive science, when was the last time you thought about the symbol grounding problem and symbolic vs connectionist cognitive architectures? Go read this and start thinking about it again. Other cognitive science links can be found at Mixing Memory

A (belated) tribute to Milton Friedman

2006-12-14T01:22:00.000+05:30

As those of you who live on this planet know, Nobel winning economist Milton Friedman passed away around a month back. Falstaff put it best when he wrote:

Friedman managed the incredible balancing trick that every academic / social scientist secretly dreams of - a formidable contribution to theory matched with an important influence over real world policy. The point about Friedman wasn't whether he was right or wrong, it was that he mattered, in a way that few of us ever will.

I don't know enough economics to appreciate his theoretical contributions. But his writings about public policy have influenced me a great deal, and his mixture of moral and utilitarian arguments for the free market I thought was optimal. His espousal of the free market made him a hate figure for some on the Left, but these people use an additional accusation to smear Milton Friedman: that he "supported" the Fascistic Pinochet's regime in Chile. This is what Friedman himself said to such accusations:

Trebach: This question says you supported Pinochet or advised Pinochet.

Friedman: I never advised Pinochet. I never supported Pinochet.

Trebach: We'll throw that one away.

Friedman: But hold on. No, I don't want to evade the question.

Trebachi: All right.

Friedman: Chile was a case in which a military regime, headed by Pinochet, was willing to switch the organization of the economy from a top-down to a bottom-up mode. In that process, a group of people who had been trained at the University of Chicago in the Department of Economics, who came to be called the Chicago Boys, played a major role in designing and implementing the economic reforrns. The real miracle in Chile was not that those economic reforms worked so well, because that's what Adam Smith said they would do. Chile is by all odds the best economic success story in Latin America today.

The real miracle is that a military junta was willing to let them do it. As I said to begin with, the principle of the military is from the top down. The principle of a market is from the bottom up. It's a real miracle that a mititary group was willing to let a bottom-up approach take over. I did make a trip to Chile and I gave talks in Chile. In fact, I did meet with Mr. Pinochet, but I never was an adviser to him, and I never got a penny from the Chdean government. But I will say that that process led to a situation in which you were able to get an election which ended the military junta. You now have a democratic government in Chile. There is as yet no similar example from the world of entirely socialist states.

So, I was not an adviser to Pinochet. I was not an adviser to the Chilean government, but I am more thanwifling to share in the credit for the extraordinary job that our students did down there. (link)

***
Here is the tribute to him from the Catallarachs, here is a selection of Friedman's writings and quotes from the Wall Street Journal.

***
My favourite quote from Milton Friedman:

Indeed, a major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it [..] gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want.

***
His book Capitalism and Freedom is not a light read, but it's a libertarian classic, and it's probably the fastest way you can acquaint yourself with the main arguments of libertarianism (it's pretty slim - less than 200 pages). The first two chapters are something everyone who has an opinion on the role of government must read. And in the chapter Occupational Licensure, he gives a great argument as to how regulation almost always benefits the incumbent and the powerful against the interests of the customer.

Link Roundup

2006-12-11T03:12:00.000+05:30

I am done with my exams and am free for 20 whole days. Got a bunch of new books I am starting off on (see the reading lists on your right) and planning to get Simpsons and SouthPark DVDs too today. Straining to keep the drool from escaping. Also, did I tell you how much I am enjoying my MacBook? I just use SpotLight for everything. The terminal has all that you get in a Linux terminal (and the copy-paste works much better than it ever did in Linux ones). Close the lid and it goes off so obediently and silently to sleep - I don't remember the last time I shut down this thing.

I plan to get out some "real content" in the next few days. Some links in the meanwhile. (Tip: Use delicious or something if you think something is interesting, but don't have the time to read now.)

***

The Stanford Prison Experiment - a proof, if it were needed, that power corrupts even good-intentioned humans. If you are too bored to go through the slideshow on that page, try the Wikipedia page, although the Wiki page lacks the sense of drama. Note the interesting parallels with Nazi generals.

***

Great post from Ravikiran on the roots of the Singur controversy.

***

One of my favourite essays from Richard Dawkins - Gaps in the Mind. No particular reason for linking it now, I just remembered it from when I read his essay collection, and found it on the web.

***

Also, some new blogs that I have been reading recently
-> Mixing Memory, a psychology blog - check out a recent post on the psychology of religion;
-> the Economist blog - who have their usual excellent fare of opinion and analysis, and via who I heard that Google is running sponsored videos on its Google Videos, and so is YouTube (somewhat) ( in other news, YouTube has removed tons of copyrighted videos from it's site)

***

On the Google Research blog, Peter Norvig (you'll recognize his name if you've studied AI sometime) gives us their list of top 20 videos of talks at Google - I watched the the first one, by Sebastian Thrun of Stanford AI group, about how they won the DARPA Grand Challenge, and it is superb.

***

Why multiplication is commutative? and other intriguing essays by Tim Gowers, a Fields Medalist and Math prof, many of which I haven't read yet.

Update on books and stuff

2006-10-30T10:57:00.000+05:30

I am near the end of my mid-quarter breather from studies. Grad school so far has been fun, and I have been immersed in things in a way I haven't been for a while. The flip side is that I am progressing through my extra-cirrucular reading far more slowly than usual (btw, updated reading lists on the right side - hover your mouse over the links and check out the neat little popups that are finally working! (I hope)). Nonetheless, I am done (or nearly done) with a few books. Here is a short review of one:

The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker: (Amazon link, Pinker's homepage)
This is the book that made Steven Pinker famous, and deservedly so, in my opinion. It's an excellent and entertaining introduction to the mechanisms underlying language. Pinker's position is that human brains possess an innate and universal capacity for language - the "language instinct" - which evolved through good ol' Darwinian selection. The book is about language, but it's also about convincing the reader of Pinker's position, and he convinces me, at any rate. Along the way, he explains some of the charming regularites in languages (why do we say higgledy-piggledy instead of piggledy-higgledy? why does abso-bloody-lutely sound better than ab-bloody-solutely?), demolishes some of the common myths about language ("language shapes thought" - the dreaded Whorfian hypothesis), and does a neat job of explaining how meaning and understanding can arise in a blind symbol-processing system (a.k.a. Physical Symbol System hypothesis), among other things. Towards the end of the book, he has a short attack on the standard social science model of assuming the human brain to be a tabula rasa and instead puts forth as an alternative the model of Evolutionary Psychology, something he returns to in more detail in The Blank Slate. The jury's still out on Pinker's particular brand of evolutionary psychology, so it's good we don't have to read a lot of it. (That last link is also good intro to EP.) It's a pretty big book (430 pgs) and I don't have much time so I will leave it here. All in all, it's a book I highly recommend if you're interested in language or are a general science junkie.

I also planned to write about Pavan Verma's Being Indian (link in the sidebar), but it's too late and I keep editing away whatever I type so I'll do it in a later installment.

Plus, I saw "The Departed" yesterday. Decent entertainment, although Matt Damon was pretty wooden-faced and technically it wasn't as slick or smooth as I hoped it to be. Also saw the trailer of the awesome 300, the movie adaptation of a graphic novel by Frank Miller and someone else about a war between Spartans and Persians. It's done in a black-and-white, high-fantasy, over-the-top style - in typical graphic novel style, in short. (It's a pity I am too impatient these days to read a whole graphic novel..) I generally am a sucker for such slick, stylistic action movies, and graphic novels will hopefully ensure a pipeline of such movies (we had Sincity and V for Vendetta before this one )

Woo-hoo!

2006-10-24T10:22:00.000+05:30

That thing I am holding ever so carefully is an Apple MacBook (check out the gallery for a closer look.) (And believe me, that grin is totally non-faked.) You can check out the config and the details for your heart's content at the Macbook page (er, same link). Additionally I got a 1 Gig Ram and 80 Gig Hard drive. Cost me 1450 bucks including the taxes and the student discount.

Now to becoming a Mac power user!

P.S.: We also had the season's first snow fall today! Today was a doubly "yay!" day!

Photus from Columbus

2006-10-17T04:50:00.000+05:30

Here. The slideshow feature in Picasa rocks.

P.S.: I am going to buy an Apple Macbook (hopefully) real soon. Yay!

In which I gaze at my navel..

2006-09-14T05:04:00.000+05:30

Figuratively, of course.

But it's all the Lalbadshah's fault.

I am thinking about: whether I like a laptop or a desktop better. Which one should I buy?

I want to: watch Roger Federer live, preferably at the Wimbledon. I am going to start saving seriously now.

I wish for a boxful of Simpsons DVDs. Oh, and I also wish for all these things. No, more relevantly, I wish I had the time to read all these, without affecting my 15 credit hour 10-week quarter, and without losing touch with more of my friends and without missing any more good movies, and without missing my "daily workout" (heh) and without missing updating my blog regularly and blah blah blah.

I hear: fingers tapping on keyboards at the computer centre I am in. (check out the cool map.)

I wonder why I wonder. (Ok, that was copied from Feynman.) Or how I wonder.

I regret: hmm.. no regrets right now.. I am fully charged and optimistic. (Although I might regret a few years later that I went for a PhD :) )

"I" am: the sense of continuity and unity that a set of neurons frantically maintain so that "I" can "focus my attention" on those aspects of the environment that need to be processed and "thought about". "I" am a fiction that some genes have found it useful to construct in order to process information more efficiently which can ultimately help perpetuate themselves further. But am "I" fictitious, really? "I" am real enough within "myself" - in fact, nothing is more real to "me" than "myself". The world just plays itself out in the theatre that is "I".

(Update: This stuff is mostly inspired by this fantastic anthology I read some time back - The Mind's I. Read the Wikipedia article on the book. Also, don't take the above stuff too seriously.)

I hate sycophants. Just to clarify, I also hate wife-beaters and the like , although I dont completely agree with this interesting story about wife-beaters.

I dance: with my eyebrows knit, looking a little like George Bush, apparently. Needless to say, I also dance pretty bad.

I sing with a distinct nasal tone. I think its because I thought Kumar Sanu was the coolest singer in the world when I was young, and tried singing like him for a lot of time, and now am stuck with a nasal tone. Apparently I even talk with a nasal twang.

I cry when I see some kinds of sentimental movies, even though the rational part of my brain is all "what the crap is going on in this movie!" I cried when watching Black, that Rani Mukherjee movie where she plays a blind girl, all the while thinking what a cheesy and manipulative movie this was.

I am not always: so pretentious.

I write: so I can look back at all this ten years down the road and laugh at myself.

I confuse: Koreans, Chinese and Japanese. I thought distinguishing them would be easy before I came to OSU (implicitly), but now that I had the chance to test myslf with larger samples (the campus just brims with Asians - Mongoloids outnumbering Indians by maybe 3 to 1), I find that I do no better than chance. Test yourself if you are too confident about your abilities, I bet you would find it tougher than you imagined. Once they talk you can figure out better - if they struggle with their English, they are probably Chinese or Japanese (but there are quite a few exceptions ofcourse.)

I am: done!

Any reader who wants to be tagged, can consider themselves tagged. Heh. Aint I clever? Or maybe I am pathetic. Whatever.

The best lines I read today

2006-09-11T07:39:00.000+05:30

Nonethless, even before investigating carefully, you can be confident that the politicians are up to no good. After all, has it EVER happened that politicians required the recitation of something uncontroversial and of unquestionable educational value, say the laws of thermodynamics? Of course not.

That's from Bill Poser - one of the diligent folks over at the superb Language Log - writing on the Vandemataram hullabaloo. More wisdom from GreatBong on the same issue.